Boulder, CO (PRWEB) May 23, 2011
The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced today that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale, a leader in high performance Fortran, C, and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel64, and MIPS. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license.
This implementation is a full replacement for the GNU libsupc++ library for platforms that use the Itanium C++ ABI, including i386 and x86-64, and will replace portions of the C++ stack previously only available under the GPL. It provides implementations of the dynamic features of C++, including dynamic casting, exception handling, and thread-safe static initializers, and will continue the gradual replacement of GNU toolchain and runtime components, furthering the aim of a purely BSD-licensed system.
“This work complements other work done in the community and is a further step in letting us adopt alternative toolchains in FreeBSD,” said Robert Watson, a FreeBSD committer and Director at the FreeBSD Foundation.
“There are already a number of STL implementations with other licenses, but libcxxrt is the missing link for a BSD licensed C++ compiler and the C++ runtime,” said NetBSD developer Joerg Sonnenberger.
“It’s great to work with the BSD community and help provide these core parts of the toolchain,” said Christopher Bergstr