On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 12:48, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Frank Jahnke wrote:
I've not tried the manual gpc installation yet -- I thought it prudent first to inquire as I become mare familiar with how to do this.
A few questions have come up:
Has anyone tried to install gpc with gcc 3.3.3? I note that the latest alpha release uses 3.3.2, and that usually these dot releases are (minor) bug fixes. Would there be any expected issues using 3.3.3? I would like to maintain compatibility with the C and Fortran compilers I'm using, and interlinkability is a MAJOR advantage.
The major known issue with 3.3.x are system-dependent conditionals.
Is this an issue with gcc or with gpc? I have had some ports break (for example, the plotting package Grace) with gcc 3.3.3 that worked fine with 2.95, for example. All cases have been with testing for system-dependent conditionals. And by system-dependent conditionals, I'm assuming that this is testing for not-a-number, infinity, and the like. Is that correct?
I don't know how serious this issue is under FreeBSD (not very much under Linux, quite serious under Dos/Windows targets). There's a work-around, but to be sure, you might want to use 3.2.x instead (which also seems to behave mostly the same for our purposes as 3.3.x). I suppose all 3.x versions are generally interlinkable (independent of language).
Russell Whitaker, myself and possibly others have tried with 3.3.3, and AFAWCT it's as good (or bad, see above) with GPC as 3.3.2.
My guess is that FreeBSD is more like Linux than DOS for this issue. I may just give it a shot with what I have, and see how it turns out.
Is the latest alpha release reasonably stable, at least for straightforward numerical code? I'm not really a compiler debugger...
You can find the known bug list on the web site. Generally I'd think it's stable enough.
I will check out the bug list. thanks for calling it to my attention.
Does the manual install work with any of the FreeBSD tools? I understand that GNU Pascal would use GNU tools, but FreeBSD has a complete complement of these (yacc, awk and nawk, sed, and so forth). Which of the FreeBSD tools (if any) should I be able to use? My hesitation is that any new tool (gawk, for example) really should be tested before it is relied upon, and the more new tools that are installed, the greater the burden becomes. The FreeBSD tools I have used enough to have confidence in (and they are supported).
A plain installation should only require GNU make (possibly GNU sed, but only for peripheral things like docdemos). The parser requires GNU bison, but the bison generated files are included in the full (not minimal) GPC source distribution, so you shouldn't need it then.
That is good news. I have gmake; as long as documentation is available in other forms (for example, ps or pdf) then I would be good to go.
Frank
the other Frank