[Nix-dev] clang-based stdenv for OSX Yosemite

[Daniel Peebles]

Anyone interested in this project should join ##nix-darwin on
freenode. There's still lots to do!

On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 9:31 PM, Joel <me at joelt.io> wrote:
> Daniel Peebles, John Wiegley, Eric Seidel, and myself have been working on a
> clang-based stdenv for OSX for the past few weeks. It is fully functional
> now and you can find it at https://github.com/joelteon/nixpkgs. It’s being
> continuously built on my Hydra instance at https://hydra.joelt.io/. If you
> would like to use our branch you should add hydra.joelt.io to your binary
> caches. To my knowledge this is the only nixpkgs fork that works with
> Yosemite.
>
> Daniel is also working on a 100% pure stdenv (which involves building
> Apple’s open source libc), but that’s still in the works.
>
> There are a few notable changes besides the obvious change in compiler. We
> are willing to revert these before merging into NixOS upstream, since
> they’re pretty major:
>
> * stdenv.gcc has been renamed to stdenv.cc. In the process we fixed a few
> bugs where packages incorrectly referred to gcc instead of the stdenv’s
> compiler. However, this does result in totally rebuilding the Linux stdenv
> as well, since the generic setup script now expects a $cc variable instead
> of a $gcc variable.
> * Instead of using the string “gcc” or “${stdenv.gcc}/bin/gcc”, we now use
> `stdenv.progname` (and `stdenv.prognamexx`).
>
> We had a few motivations for this effort. I’d been considering using clang
> as my stdenv’s main compiler ever since I found out that some of the
> packages I hold dear (such as vim and phantomjs) need to be built with
> Apple’s ported GCC 4.2.1. Aside from my philosophical objection to this,
> Yosemite’s developer previews were unable to compile GCC at all (at least
> for the first 3). I think it’s possible to compile GCC on Yosemite GM, but
> I’m no longer inclined to try as this branch now uses Apple’s officially
> supported compiler.
>
> We’d welcome your input and also your help; there’s still a lot left to do.
>
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