Re: Removal of VAX/VMS support

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at redhat dot com>]

> Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com> writes:
>
>
> > The '90's were about target ports.  Companies like Cygnus made a
> > business out of it.  It was in their best interest to keep the
> > incremental cost of adding a target low.  That unfortunatly came with
> > a very high cost - binutils core development slowed if not stalled
> > entirely.  Everyone was too busy porting/fixing targets to do core
> > changes.  Ask the simple question, is binutils faster or slower than
> > it was 10 years ago?
>
>
> That's simply not accurate.  There was a great deal of core
> development on the binutils all through the '90s.  The binutils are
> much faster today than they were 10 years ago.  And 10 years ago there
> was no ELF support and no shared library support.

What you can't know is that my `10 years' was a guess.  It was based on 
GDB where only now, and 10 years later, we're finally fixing some basic 
design problems.  Looking through BINUTILS I find:

	Thu May 19 1994  Ian Lance Taylor  (ian@tweedledumb.cygnus.com)
        Add support for ELF shared libraries.

	I'm guessing that ELF was '93 and BFD was '90 or '91.

Shall we agree on 5 years and call it quits? :-)

> > Why do I say, and how do I know this?  Because it is exactly what
> > happened to GDB.
>
>
> gdb has been slowed down for a number of reasons, including politics,
> complexity, and the fact that the code base is much older than the
> binutils.  Adding target ports probably also contributed.  It also
> takes more work for gdb to maintain a target port than it does for the
> binutils.

I still think it is closer to the truth than we'd like to admit.  How 
come >10 years after bfd's introduction, I still find:

	gas/config/vms-conf.h:48:#undef BFD_ASSEMBLER

In terms of age, BINUTILS and GDB also appear to be the same vintage, 
GDB is '86ish and GAS has (C) notices that go back to that same year.

In terms of performance, just like GCC and GDB, there it is an 
expectation that BINUTILS will keep with the competition.  If it doesn't 
then it is getting slower.

I should also note that I don't want to take anything away from the 
BINUTILS / BFD architecture.  The fact that things have lasted this long 
tells us that the underlying design is very sound.  It is just that I'd 
like to see people free to push the design harder.

The last thing BINUTILS needs is baggage.  I think, rather than 
hindering things, we should strongly encourage and support any moves by 
the BINUTILS maintainers to prune the target list.

enjoy,
Andrew