GCC Developers Discuss Dropping Poorly Supported, Niche CPU Architectures
Following the discussion over potentially obsoleting/deprecating the Itanium IA-64 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), developers are discussing similar treatment for some of the other poorly-maintained CPU ports.
GCC developers have begun discussing potentially deprecating some of the other CPU ports that rarely ever see new code activity. There are also known limitations with some of them, not supporting modern GCC features, and just rotting away without any active maintainership. The ports/architectures under discussion are:
The "epiphany" port for the Adapteva Epiphany architecture saw two fixes in 2024 but before that the prior change was all the way back in 2016 with a fix.
The "m32c" is another poorly maintained port with the last fix for this Renesas M32C 32-bit MCU port being done is all the way back in 2015.
The "rl78" port for the Renesas RL78 low-power 8-bit and 16-bit micro-controllers hasn't seen a fix since 2018.
These ports do not have any maintainer and see fixes rarely. There is also discussion over making GCC test suite test results done for each architecture a minimum of once per year to be considered maintained.
That discussion is now happening in this GCC thread. It's likely we'll see all three of them end up being deprecated and then removed a release cycle later if no one steps up to maintain the code.
GCC developers have begun discussing potentially deprecating some of the other CPU ports that rarely ever see new code activity. There are also known limitations with some of them, not supporting modern GCC features, and just rotting away without any active maintainership. The ports/architectures under discussion are:
The "epiphany" port for the Adapteva Epiphany architecture saw two fixes in 2024 but before that the prior change was all the way back in 2016 with a fix.
The "m32c" is another poorly maintained port with the last fix for this Renesas M32C 32-bit MCU port being done is all the way back in 2015.
The "rl78" port for the Renesas RL78 low-power 8-bit and 16-bit micro-controllers hasn't seen a fix since 2018.
These ports do not have any maintainer and see fixes rarely. There is also discussion over making GCC test suite test results done for each architecture a minimum of once per year to be considered maintained.
That discussion is now happening in this GCC thread. It's likely we'll see all three of them end up being deprecated and then removed a release cycle later if no one steps up to maintain the code.