Hacker News Reader

Comment by c00p3r | Hacker News Reader

1. Get latest OpenSolaris. 2. Install latest SunStudio 3. download latest source of Python (3.1) and Ruby (1.9.1). 4. Try to build them with CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc" CFLAGS="-m64" 5. See the results. Run make test for ruby.

View on HN

So Ruby compiles cleaner on failed Unix OSs?

It's a bit harsh (albeit not completely off-base) to call solaris a failure but I do agree that c00p3r's argument is quite meaningless with regard to a ruby versus python comparison.

Both impls appear to work well enough on a wide range of platforms, the sun compiler is not exactly what makes or breaks it.

No. Its standard modules were coded more portable way.

btw, Solaris will stay on its niche like FreeBSD.

10 years ago Solaris' niche was being the standard OS at financial services companies. These days, that standard is Linux, generally Red Hat - nobody's buying SPARC anymore and Solaris on Intel runs very few apps. The largest hedge fund, the top tier investment banks, and the top retail banks have all abandoned Solaris. The only new purchases from Sun are support contracts on ancient kit that's still waiting to be replaced.

The first (and only) thing you should do with with any proprietary UNIX's cc is to build gcc.

After that, your problem disappears.

Our company provides and supports commercial builds of Python along with 40+ other packages (including scipy, numpy, PIL, wxPython, etc.) on Solaris. The Sun compiler is not great, but that has very little to do with Python.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com