Upgrading the compiler toolchain

[miladfarca]

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.

[targos]

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

[miladfarca]

/cc @nodejs/build

[miladfarca]

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

[kadler]

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+).