> applications on SPARC

I though it worthwhile to put together some notes on the current problems pertaining to the state of applications on SPARC, specifically illumos. These are generic across illumos distributions although informed by my experience maintaining applications on Tribblix.

(On Tribblix, the aim generally is that if I can build an application easily on SPARC then it will be packaged, and at the same version as on x86 if I can. The aim is to avoid unnecessary divergence and make it easier to fill gaps later.)

Desktop

Quite a lot of desktop applications work on SPARC. On Tribblix, I've ignored enlightenment and Qt as environments, and don't build Pale Moon or LibreOffice. But all the old window managers work, as do the base desktops like Xfce and MATE.

Actually using a desktop is trickier, as running an X server locally is problematic due to issues around drivers for graphics cards. But pointing a working X server to an xdm session on the SPARC system works pretty well.

Go

There is no go port for SPARC. This largely removes the entire ecosystem of modern go applications at a stroke.

Yes, there's gccgo. That is really quite old (in terms of go versions, it's always behind), and is just the compiler not the entire ecosystem.

Node

There's no port of Node.JS to SPARC, largely because there's no port of the V8 javascript runtime on which it's based.

Java

Support for SPARC was removed from OpenJDK upstream at the same time support for Solaris was removed. At the present time, I have builds of JDK17 for SPARC on both illumos and Solaris 11.4 available for download. This is good enough to run the Jenkins agent. The port has reached JDK18 and early builds of JDK19; whether it will go much further (because of virtual threads) remains to be seen.

Rust

Currently we don't have rust. Making it work doesn't seem to be an insurmountable problem, as it is available as a cross-compile target and Solaris 11 has it. Apart from the direct impact of blocking applications written in Rust, there's also a number of Python modules that can't be build because they use Rust, or depend on some other module that needs Rust.

Python

By and large, Python works. There are issues with module availability due to the Rust requirement, and some Python scripts seem to run abnormally slowly on SPARC.

Haskell

I don't currently have Haskell (ghc) available on SPARC. I do have an older bootstrap so it may be possible to get something more current working.