Is The Open64 Compiler Finally Down For The Count?

It's been over three years since the last major Open64 compiler update and development of Open64 seems more or less over. This open-source compiler with a long history vanished from the web this week and some question whether its website will even return.

The Open64 compiler mailing list has been relatively quiet for months now but this week the activity on this SourceForge-hosted list was lit up when a developer noted that the Open64.net site no longer resolves (and still remains down as of writing this article). There's been no official communication as to why the site is down or if it plans to return, aside from various developers not being surprised.

One developer commented, "The remedy is let it stay down. I don't say this from a 'hater' perspective, but it's time for open64 to die and something else to be reborn from the ashes."

Open64 had been around for more than a decade and did have a following within research groups. AMD was interested in Open64, but their AMD Open64 compiler fork hasn't been updated since 2013 when they added Piledriver support.

We'll see what happens. At least GCC and LLVM/Clang continue to thrive greatly along with specialty compiler products such as those through PathScale. The Portable C Compiler (PCC) is another one with a long history that we still hear things about once in a great while.