-fcheck-memory-usage, Checker, Purify, and core files.

[Mike Simons <msimons at saic1 dot com>]

  Purify with EGCS on our Sparcs is making a royal racket, but 
successfully links everything I've wasted time one when given the 
correct options, (I hope to send tips explaining how to get it working 
or at least what works for me).

So I looked into the new -fcheck-memory-usage option...

  When even a simple program (one malloc) is compiled with this option it 
causes an internal compiler error 11 (SEGV), and dumps a 10 Meg core
file (this has been reported by at least two people already).  There 
is no text documentation on this option, so I grep'ed and scanned the 
EGCS source for info, not knowing anything about the compiler internals
there wasn't much gleaned.  From the change log I see patch that
added this option was submitted into the GNU baseline August 2nd 1997 
by Tristan Gingold, (the author of Checker).
  On August 3rd EGCS branched off.  I suspect that more changes where made 
to the GNU baseline related to this option since then, but it hasn't 
been copied over.  (At that time I could only speculate... now that
GGCS 2.8.0 is out I can check for myself).

  Tristan said that all of his changes were submitted to the GNU group 
and accepted, he hasn't submitted to EGCS.  Also that this option is 
relies on the next version of Checker, which should come out soon.

  Could someone with access to the GGCS repository merge any additional
patches into EGCS?  I will try looking at 2.8.0 if no one speaks up... 
yeah learning curve.
  Meanwhile, could the command line parser engine for EGCS simply say that
this option is unsupported at this time (give a date)?  So others don't 
waste time figuring out why the compiler cores...

-- 

    Thanks,
      Mike Simons
      Science Applications International Corporation
      msimons@saic1.com                  703-925-5674