Upgrading the compiler toolchain

V8 recently introduced std::format, but the change was reverted due to lack of support on older compilers. This feature is only available starting from GCC 13.1 and Clang 14 , which means the existing GCC base version (12.2) might become obsolete soon.

Additionally, V8 officially discontinued support for GCC at the end of July 2024. Any remaining GCC support now mainly comes from third-party platforms on V8 (e.g., ppc64 and s390x).

Rust was also added as a dependency to help support Temporal. Since Rust relies on LLVM for code generation, maintaining support for the LLVM toolchain (and Clang) will be necessary going forward.

Considering the availability of GCC vs Clang across different platforms (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, AIX, etc.), should the community aim to upgrade to GCC 13.1+ or transition entirely to Clang?

A mixed toolchain approach may be less than ideal, as platforms sticking with GCC would need to continue patching compilation errors as they arise.

Are there platforms that we support and don't have Clang ?

/cc @nodejs/build

As discussed we need to map supported Clang versions across the OS versions we support.

Are there platforms that we support and don't have Clang ?

Clang is being worked on for IBM i, but is not currently available (neither is GCC 13+).

Initial changes have landed for ppc64le/s390x and we are now building/testing V8 (release) with Clang on RHEL: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6705431

With nodejs/node#59048, we will require Clang >=19.

Correct, currently using clang version 19.1.7 on RHEL 8.10 .

fyi @nodejs/platform-smartos

fyi @nodejs/platform-smartos

Our current Jenkins build zones we provide you do not have gcc13 in them. The ones I use to fix bugs, however:

nuc-build-2024(~)[0]% gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 13.3.0
Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

nuc-build-2024(~)[0]%

do. We should probably discuss updating them^H^H^H^H the build zones, possibly even spinning new ones if my recent contributions to v8 (which still haven't landed upstream in google's v8 yet) work as well as they should.

We also have clang in pkgsrc:

nuc-build-2024(~)[0]% pkgin avail | grep clang
clang-18.1.8nb3      C language family frontend for LLVM
opencl-clang-18.1.0nb3 OpenCL-oriented wrapper library around clang
nuc-build-2024(~)[0]%

and I should see if I can build using that.

Also, this v8 fix isn't in node yet (never mind upstream V8), but needs to be if we wanna solve the gcc13 and/or clang problem: nodejs/node#58237

ansible: install Clang on Fedora hosts

So we can start experimenting, here is a PR to install Clang on the Fedora-based CI hosts: #4116

ansible: install Clang on Fedora hosts (#4116)

Question regarding the Rust toolchain support: Should we consider migrating from ccache to sccache (https://github.com/mozilla/sccache) ? That would expand the caching footprint to include rust.

I was looking at recommended ways to install Rust on Fedora: https://developer.fedoraproject.org/tech/languages/rust/rust-installation.html

I guess we need to decide on a general strategy. Do we want to:

Depend on the version distributed by the OS?
Install rustup and setup Rust with Ansible?
Something else?

On RHEL we current use the first option and use the package rust-toolset-1.84.1, I've added more details here: nodejs/node#58730 (comment)

Alpine -> ansible: update Alpine containers #4142

Just wondering, should this line be updated now as well?:
https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/983fd3fcf7a929122574a5babe6551a8d459b1a1/BUILDING.md?plain=1#L110

That is:

-| GNU/Linux        | x64              | kernel >= 3.10, musl >= 1.1.19    | Experimental | e.g. Alpine 3.8                      |
+| GNU/Linux        | x64              | kernel >= 3.10, musl >= 1.2.5     | Experimental | e.g. Alpine 3.20                     |

(this assumes that binaries built on Alpine 3.21 and 3.22 can run on Alpine 3.20, as it uses the same version of musl libc)

Ah, it looks like that Ansible template is only used for CI. I just opened PR nodejs/node#61569 for this.

@richardlau

Today, I setup ubuntu2404-arm64 Docker containers.
There are currently 6 with the ubuntu2404-arm64 label, two of them which also have the ubuntu2404_debug-arm64 label, mirroring the 2204 setup.

There are two more ubuntu2204-arm64 containers but they are on osuosl and are currently offline (/cc @richardlau so I didn't touch that host).

I updated the following jobs to use ubuntu2404* instead of ubuntu2204*:

There is still https://ci.nodejs.org/view/All/job/reproducibility-test/configure that specifically tests ubuntu2204 but I don't want to break the workflow, so @sxa feel free to change it when you're ready.

@targos

Thanks @targos - I've updated the config of the reproducibility job so hopefully it'll run through ok.

[EDIT: I needed to get rid of the CC=gcc-12 that was hard coded in that job since the new machines have gcc13 by default]
EDIT 2: The job was set to run with -j32 which seems to have overwhelmed the system but was ok on the previous ones - are they a different spec in terms of CPU/memory? Regardless, I've dropped it to -j8 as the -j32 was set when we had the giant Ampere's from equinix - which is also the reason the test was being done on aarch64 :-)

There are two more ubuntu2204-arm64 containers but they are on osuosl and are currently offline (/cc @richardlau so I didn't touch that host).

I've replaced the two Ubuntu 22.04 containers on the OSUOSL host with Ubuntu 24.04 as part of #4229 (via changes to the inventory in the secrets repo).

We are upgrading Clang and rustc versions on certain platforms: #4265

ansible: install clang on AIX (#4234)

aix: select clang for Node.26+ builds (#4286)

Closing this issue as most platforms have now switched to using Clang.
Upgrading Clang itself will be tracked here: #4265
Upgrading SmartOS machines will be tracked here: #4259

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