In article F134B35F65F0CF11B9DB00805FD689570139DC7A@GBHDM001, Thompson, Robin S robin.thompson@eds.com writes
I'm currently evaluating gpc as a replacement for a commercial (and no longer supported) Pascal compiler on IBM RS/6000 systems running AIX Unix 4.2.1. The project we're intending to use it on contains nearly 250,000 lines of Pascal code, and needs to interface to libraries written in C.
To help with my evaluation, I'd be grateful if anyone else on the list who has used gpc with a major project could let me know if it was successful, and also what, if any, problems were experienced. I'm also seeking general opinions on whether, given the current alpha status of gpc, it's stable enough to be used on such a large project?
We (my colleague David James did the work) have recently converted a large suite of programs from EPC Pascal-E to GPC. The software makes calls to various C libraries and this has not been a problem. The problems I have been aware of include severe problems with modules which forced us to translate them all to units; various problems with strings (particularly the failure to initialise the capacity in some circumstances); repeated problems with packed arrays within records (easily solved by not packing them) and occasional problems with sets. We have also been embarrassed on a number of occasions to find bugs in our code that were due to uninitialised variables that Pascal-E had automatically initialised whereas GPC doesn't. This is not a criticism of GPC but just an illustration of the difficulties of porting between compilers. (Hopefully David will pop up in due course to add any problems I have forgotten). However we have overcome all these and the software is now in use.
I'd say that the stability of GPC for large projects is marginal but steadily improving thanks to the efforts of the development team. Remember that this is open source software so you always have the option of fixing any compiler problems that are affecting you badly enough (and contributing the fixes back to help the rest of us).