[csw-maintainers] Solaris Studio vs GCC

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

I recently spent some time building a couple of libraries with GCC, in
the /opt/csw/gxx prefix. I was surprised how easy that was. Yes, there
were some issues, but most of them because of stupid hardcoded stuff
of the type of "you're on Solaris so you must be compiling with
something else", and removing Solaris-specific #define bits made
problems go away. I managed to build Boost 1.49.0 with GCC, but not
with Solaris Studio - I got about a screenful of templating errors.

When interacting with upstreams, using Studio often gets in the way. I
often get responses that if I'm building with Studio, I'm on my own as
far building is concerned. Overall, using it seems to add workload
rather than removing it.

If we plan on keeping on being standardized on Solaris Studio, we
should have some kind of rationale written up. If it is about
performance, we should have some numbers put out to show how big the
benefit is. If it is about helpful error messages, we should have an
example or two out. Whatever the reason is, some kind of example
should be put up on one of our web sites.

Thoughts?

Maciej