Hello

We have recently bought in the lab x86_64 computers, with system redhat linux Fedora Core 6. I have ported to this system what I need to work, namely the GNU Pascal compiler and the GRX library. The problem (for me) was that I work usually with djgpp, very seldom with linux or mingw.

No real problem to compile and install the GNU Pascal compiler in the usual way for both modes i386 and x86_64, once seen the strange locations of libraries. It needs some manual twiddling to have it work properly.

Configure with: ../gcc-3.4.6/configure --disable-nls --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --enable-languages=c,pascal --enable-__cxa_atexit --disable-libunwind-exceptions --host=x86_64-redhat-linux

For -m64 make then install in a temp64 directory with cd gcc; make prefix=~/temp64 pascal.install-with-gcc (to see what happens) For -m32 make PFLAGS=-m32 RTSFLAGS=-m32 then install similarly in a temp32 directory

and then install the -m64 compiler in the system and move manually the -m32 libgpc.a where it belongs for this strange architecture (in a /32 subdirectory). After that I can compile pascal programs simply by issuing gpc -m64 ... and gpc -m32 ...

I have at the end

system gcc: version 4.1.0 20060304 (Red Hat 4.1.0-3) target x86_64-redhat-linux location: /usr (and below)

gpc : version 20060325, based on gcc-3.4.6 location /usr/local I have checked by running the test suite patched with the testsuite64 and testsuite64-2 diffs given by Adriaan that gpc runs very correctly both in i386 (-m32) and x86_64 (-m64) modes, with same few residual errors found by Adriaan van Os for 64 bits targets (no difference between Integer and LongestInteger).

Now comes GRX. It is a pity that Mariano has forked, discarding both Pascal and BGI. Since I work exclusively in Pascal with BGI interface, this is clearly not a valid option for me. I had two possibilities: porting both Pascal and BGI to MGRX, or backporting the x86_64 from MGRX to GRX. The second seemed simpler to me. Indeed GRX had already 64 bits targets, so that it is only necessary to change some defines in grx20.h and include/libgrx.h, and to make corresponding changes in makedefs.grx, various makefiles, grx.pas and some demo programs. Precisely I started from grx247pre2, i.e. grx247p1 from the grx site, with corrections by Florian Xaver to make it compile with recent versions of djgpp. I added corrections put in the grx mailing list mainly by Frank Heckenbach to the pascal interfaces and the configure script, and correct a couple of bugs I have found meanwhile. Then I made the x86_64 backport, and added a correction pointed to by the latest versions (4.x) of the GCC compiler which issues warnings indicating invalid typecasts from pointer (64 bits in x86_64) to int (32 bits in x86_64). (they are used in memfill.h and memcopy.h to do pointer arithmetics for alignment purposes). This is made by introducing a GR_PtrInt type, which name is taken from gpc. It is simply astonishing that this error is indicated only as a warning, and only in the latest gcc: it will bite as soon as one uses memories greater than 4 Gbytes, i.e. as soon as one has a real need for 64 bit integers. May be in twenty years from now C will be a strict compiler like pascal. All changes are indicated in the updated doc/changes file.

Anyway I have checked that it compiles and install as expected and that demo programs, as well as my own programs, work correctly in X11 both for 32 bits and 64 bits versions (and also in djgpp, simply to check I have not destroyed something).

I have put the result (sources) temporarily in

http://www.gnu-pascal.de/contrib/maurice/grx247p3.tar.gz http://www.gnu-pascal.de/contrib/maurice/grx247p3.zip

It should be checked and put in a more appropriate place by someone who has write access to grx.

Maurice