RFC: remove all Oracle Solaris support #25706
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There is no straightforward way for the Zig team to access the Solaris system headers; to do this, one has to create an Oracle account, accept their EULA to download the installer ISO, and finally install it on a machine or VM. We do not have to jump through hoops like this for any other OS that we support, and no one on the team has expressed willingness to do it. As a result, we cannot audit any Solaris contributions to std.c or other similarly sensitive parts of the standard library. The best we would be able to do is assume that Solaris and illumos are 100% compatible with no way to verify that assumption. But at that point, the solaris and illumos OS tags would be functionally identical anyway. For Solaris especially, any contributions that involve APIs introduced after the OS was made closed-source would also be inherently more risky than equivalent contributions for other proprietary OSs due to the case of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., wherein Oracle clearly demonstrated its willingness to pursue legal action against entities that merely copy API declarations. Finally, Oracle laid off most of the Solaris team in 2017; the OS has been in maintenance mode since, presumably to be retired completely sometime in the 2030s. For these reasons, this commit removes all Oracle Solaris support. Anyone who still wishes to use Zig on Solaris can try their luck by simply using illumos instead of solaris in target triples - chances are it'll work. But there will be no effort from the Zig team to support this use case; we recommend that people move to illumos instead.
| .openbsd => try define(w, "__OpenBSD__"), | ||
| .dragonfly => try define(w, "__DragonFly__"), | ||
| .solaris => try defineStd(w, "sun", is_gnu), | ||
| .illumos => try defineStd(w, "sun", is_gnu), |
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FYI @Vexu note the replacement of solaris with illumos rather than outright removal of the prong. I'm assuming a lot of this code mirrors Clang frontend code and therefore never properly handled illumos because LLVM/Clang lump them together in a single solaris tag.
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Note: The illumos compilers patch gcc/clang to also use __illumos__ the platforms have diverged enough that this matters.
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Lines 6868 to 6870 in dba1bf9
I think this should be picked up by translate-c as well, though obviously Aro will want to add that macro independently too.
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To clarify Zig project policy on supporting operating systems, the equation goes something like this:
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rip, but not unexpected. It could work if the standard library migrated away from |
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There is no straightforward way for the Zig team to access the Solaris system headers; to do this, one has to create an Oracle account, accept their EULA to download the installer ISO, and finally install it on a machine or VM. We do not have to jump through hoops like this for any other OS that we support, and no one on the team has expressed willingness to do it.
As a result, we cannot audit any Solaris contributions to
std.cor other similarly sensitive parts of the standard library. The best we would be able to do is assume that Solaris and illumos are 100% compatible with no way to verify that assumption. But at that point, thesolarisandillumosOS tags would be functionally identical anyway.For Solaris especially, any contributions that involve APIs introduced after the OS was made closed-source would also be inherently more risky than equivalent contributions for other proprietary OSs due to the case of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., wherein Oracle clearly demonstrated its willingness to pursue legal action against entities that merely copy API declarations.
Finally, Oracle laid off most of the Solaris team in 2017; the OS has been in maintenance mode since, presumably to be retired completely sometime in the 2030s.
For these reasons, this commit removes all Oracle Solaris support.
Anyone who still wishes to use Zig on Solaris can try their luck by simply using
illumosinstead ofsolarisin target triples - chances are it'll work. But -- assuming this is merged without objection -- there will be no effort from the Zig team to support this use case; we recommend that people move to illumos instead.