Re: firefox-esr 52.6.0 available for alpha

[Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 12:43:54AM -0600, Bob Tracy wrote:
> At some point in the near future, it will no longer be possible to build
> Firefox on an Alpha unless someone takes up the gauntlet and puts
> together a working Rust compiler. 

Rust uses the LLVM backend.  There was once an experimental Alpha
backend to LLVM.  I am currently attempting to forward port it to
more recent LLVM to see if it might be useful.  It only supported
EV6 and better CPUs which is a higher CPU standard than in Debian
Alpha.  I might get it back to EV56 (when BWX was introduced) and
be able to make sub-architectures to optionally switch in MVI and
CIX. But I have no intention of supporting anything without the
BWX.  And I doubt it will ever produce code the quality of gcc.

I do have a patch that would switch the Debian gcc to produce
code, by default, with BWX.  I haven't ever got around to sending
it to the gcc maintainer to switch over Debian Alpha to only
support Alphas with BWX.  But if I did that then if we ever got
LLVM going again on Alpha there would be no baseline
incompatibility.

Cheers
Michael.