Mold Linker Decides To Drop DEC Alpha Support: Likely Broken & No Actual Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mold Linker Decides To Drop DEC Alpha Support: Likely Broken & No Actual Users

The high performance open-source Mold linker has released version 2.34 with various improvements while also deciding to throw in the towel on DEC Alpha processor support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-Linker-2.34

[uid313]

Good, they should remove 32-bit PowerPC, s90x, m68k, and SH-4 too!

[Daktyl198]

Can anybody explain to me why open-source software, that has extremely easy to acquire older versions of themselves, need to keep support for such ancient architectures readily available? Like, nobody is running Linux 6.11 and using Mold on a DEC Alpha because it's literally not powerful enough to do so, and yet here we are with "support" for the architecture.

Why not strip out any architecture not actively maintained or produced in the last 15 years, and anybody using that architecture just has to use older software that actually works on it in the first place.

[ssokolow]

Can anybody explain to me why open-source software, that has extremely easy to acquire older versions of themselves, need to keep support for such ancient architectures readily available? Like, nobody is running Linux 6.11 and using Mold on a DEC Alpha because it's literally not powerful enough to do so, and yet here we are with "support" for the architecture.

Why not strip out any architecture not actively maintained or produced in the last 15 years, and anybody using that architecture just has to use older software that actually works on it in the first place.

The point of having modern toolchain components for retro platforms is cross-compilation. See, for example, Retro68 or Open Watcom v2. ...or, for that matter, gcc-ia16.

Example problems with just using an old version:

• Difficulty getting old C or C++ programs to build with modern compilers. (I've encountered this with things as recent as the last release version of OpenSLP from 2013.)
• Not everyone has experience plumbing together a toolchain when they're not just installing all the bits and pieces in the system-default locations.
• Some parts of the toolchain (eg. the version of GCC with the latest and greatest optimizers) may assume command-line flags that your frozen version is too old to have.

[Chewi]

Good, they should remove 32-bit PowerPC, s90x, m68k, and SH-4 too!

Ahem, I am using it on m68k, and several of us donated to get that support in.

[kpedersen]

Can anybody explain to me why open-source software, that has extremely easy to acquire older versions of themselves, need to keep support for such ancient architectures readily available?

Mainly so that if an improvement was made to the older version of the tool by some guy using his old DEC Alpha, people using the later versions wouldn't be able to benefit from his work without frontporting his changes back up through the revisions. Not always an easy task.

You would end up with a mess of the older tool having more recent innovations than the later versions of the tool. This does happen but as developers, we do try to avoid it.

[Rallos Zek]

Can anybody explain to me why open-source software, that has extremely easy to acquire older versions of themselves, need to keep support for such ancient architectures readily available? Like, nobody is running Linux 6.11 and using Mold on a DEC Alpha because it's literally not powerful enough to do so, and yet here we are with "support" for the architecture.

Why not strip out any architecture not actively maintained or produced in the last 15 years, and anybody using that architecture just has to use older software that actually works on it in the first place.

Code quality!

Software - kernels - libraries that are portable and work well on multiple platforms tend to be more easily portable to future hardware and software platforms, and reduce the need of longer code clean ups and bug fixes in the future.

[Dawn]

Good, they should remove 32-bit PowerPC, s90x, m68k, and SH-4 too!

What exactly is your problem with s390x? Or... literally any of these, tbh?

[bug77]

Oh, no! Next thing, I'll discover they removed support for Z80 as well

[oleid]

Ahem, I am using it on m68k, and several of us donated to get that support in.

Too bad, uid313 said it should get removed because they don't need it. The verdict was passed. Sorry.