Development on GCC on nixos

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I agree building vanilla gcc is not trivial on NixOS. And doing upstream development using nixpkgs derivations is even harder. I suggest a simple hack: use buildFHSEnv to get development environment. Something like the following:

# shell.nix:
{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

let e =
  pkgs.buildFHSEnv {
    name = "gcc-git-build-env";
    targetPkgs = ps: with ps; [
      # library depends
      gmp gmp.dev
      isl
      libffi libffi.dev
      libmpc
      libxcrypt
      mpfr mpfr.dev
      xz xz.dev
      zlib zlib.dev

      # git checkout need flex as they are not complete release tarballs
      m4
      bison
      flex
      texinfo

      # test harness
      dejagnu
      autogen

      # valgrind annotations
      valgrind valgrind.dev

      # toolchain itself
      gcc
      stdenv.cc
      stdenv.cc.libc stdenv.cc.libc_dev
    ];
  };
in e.env

The full session would look like that:

$ nix-shell

# fetch
$$ git clone --depth 1 https://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git

# build / install
$$ mkdir gcc-build
$$ cd gcc-build
$$ ../gcc/configure --disable-multilib --prefix=$PWD/../gcc-installed
$$ make -j $(nproc)
$$ make install

# test basics
$$ printf '#include <iostream>\nint main() { std::cout << "Hello!" << std::endl ; }' > a.cc
$$ ../gcc-installed/bin/g++ a.cc -o a -static-libstdc++
$$ ./a
Hello!

# run testsuite
$$ make check
...
                === gcc Summary ===
# of expected passes            191743
# of unexpected failures        107

I hope it will help you get started.

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