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Re: Removal of VAX/VMS support
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.
> 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.
Ian