IBM Is Looking At Adding AIX Support To LLVM / Clang

[phoronix]

Phoronix: IBM Is Looking At Adding AIX Support To LLVM / Clang

While IBM has their own in-house XL C/C++ compiler for their AIX operating system and GCC is also supported there too, IBM engineers are looking at adding AIX support to LLVM/Clang...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-Looking-At-AIX-LLVM-Clang

[FireBurn]

Seems strange they're just adding P when Z has been supported for a while now

[uid313]

IBM should just open source or retire AIX.

[kpedersen]

IBM should just open source or retire AIX.

I would personally love them to but not only do they probably not quite care enough but for it to be really useful it would need to run on commodity x86 hardware. Getting hold of a POWER machine these days is expensive or obsolete. Building up a community around a dying hardware is always going to be difficult.

[M1kkko]

Why does this exist?

[brad0]

Why does this exist?

Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet?

[wizard69]

Good news for LLVM/CLang. Like it or not there are a lot of talented people working for IBM, this just means more meaningful contributions to the stack.

Beyond that AIX isn’t going anywhere. IBM is big on services to several industries that will never put their software stacks in to MS hands or even into the hands of the Linux world.

[schmidtbag]

I would personally love them to but not only do they probably not quite care enough but for it to be really useful it would need to run on commodity x86 hardware. Getting hold of a POWER machine these days is expensive or obsolete. Building up a community around a dying hardware is always going to be difficult.

It kinda worked for Solaris, and that had a much smaller marketshare (at least in terms of being an OS built for a specific CPU architecture).

[svennek]

Getting hold of a POWER machine these days is expensive or obsolete.

Really? Last I checked they smallest 1CPU Power8 (I think) 1U models was in the 5kUSD ballpark... Noting special for a server (not cheap either, but hey, P-series hardware is well-engineered)...

[edwaleni]

Really? Last I checked they smallest 1CPU Power8 (I think) 1U models was in the 5kUSD ballpark... Noting special for a server (not cheap either, but hey, P-series hardware is well-engineered)...

Agreed. P-Series is well engineered. But its resale value after 4 years is not much better than high end x86. Replacement part costs after the 3rd year is outrageous, hence the large profits off maintenance contracts. This is why more people are going "more of cheap, less of expensive" hardware stacks.