Re: OFFTOPIC: Best compiler ???

Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
25 Sep 1999 06:14:28 -0700


Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> The other way to test compilers like the beta gcc 2.95.1 is to build
> perl on about 8 platforms and see how many testsuite items fail. Thats
> also very instructive.

Did you mean a pre-release version of 2.95.1? gcc 2.95.1 isn't beta.
FWIW, I've done precisely that test, and got no test suite failures when
compiling Perl 5.005_03 under gcc 2.95.1, once the hints file for Solaris
was tweaked slightly to recognize that yes, I *was* using vendor ld.
(This bug is fixed in the latest development version of Perl.)

Tested on Digital UNIX 4.0, Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7, Solaris x86 2.6,
AIX 4.1 and 4.2, HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00, and Linux (Red Hat 6.0).
Bootstrapping of gcc 2.95.1 fails on Digital UNIX 3.2c, and I was also
unable to get it to bootstrap on a libc5 self-compiled Linux system,
although that system has a lot of oddities that could be causing that.

Be careful to use the right pieces of binutils in the right places. I'm
currently not using GNU ld on any platform except Linux, and GNU as only
on Linux, AIX, and HP-UX.

Note also that there's a known hard-to-fix bug in gcc on IRIX related to
passing of small structures on the stack that will cause gcc to miscompile
a small number of libc calls, most critically inet_ntoa(). So be careful
with networking code on IRIX. I used the vendor compiler for Perl there.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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