OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Aug 30, 2012 4:34 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
In reply to: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns by rriggs
Parent article: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Not just that, the systems are miserable to work on and have toolchains that, were it not for backward compatibility, would've long since been thrown out.

When most Solaris users' response to a new box is "Argh, get gcc and the GNU tools on here, change my PATH, aaaaaaaaah" you know you have a problem.

A really good move - about 5 years ago - would've been for Sun-before-Oracle to have licensed icc from Intel and dropped it in as a sane replacement for SunStudio. That alone would've made a surprising difference IMO.

OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Aug 30, 2012 4:35 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

Well, except for the pesky "no SPARC support" issue with icc ;-)

OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Aug 31, 2012 22:39 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Sadly icc is in the same bucket as SunStudio. Really. Only three compilers matter today: MSVC (it's awful, but people support it because they have no choice), GCC (it works everywhere and it's also compiler for Linux), and Clang (for one but important reason: Apple is popular enough and Apple pushes Clang). Everything else is a no-go (or rather: no-go for general-purpose OS, niche projects have their own pet compilers... even icc is used not just to run SPECs).

Five years ago the only choices were MSVC and GCC. Why Sun tried to kill itself by refusing to accept reality is beyond me. Sun succeeded, BTW.