RE: gcc compatibility with Sun Forte

["Rupert Wood" <me at rupey dot net>]

Juli Heaton wrote:

> I am beginning a C++ software development program.  We have gcc,
> etc. in-house and are planning to use this for our development. 
> However, we have a requirement to be compatible with Sun Forte.
> Our customer will be integrating several products together using Sun
> Forte.
> 
> Can you give me any documentation you have on this to convince my
> customer that the gcc product we provide will be compatible with
> their setup.

In my (limited) experience of this the only real problem is with the STL
implementations. If you're using GCC 3+ then you should be OK: the
syntax-checking in GCC is at least as strict as Forte's, and both
compilers are roughly equivalently conforming. On the other hand, I've
seen Forte-specific STL oddities and the odd templating bug so I don't
think that you can avoid testing with Forte completely.

Forte vs 2.95: Forte enforces the std namespace but 2.95 doesn't.
Back-porting to 2.95 from Forte, you might hit problems with missing
stringstreams in GCC 2.95, but I can't think of anything else of the top
of my head.

The only document I've seen would be Red Hat's Solaris-to-Linux porting
guide,

     http://www.redhat.com/devnet/whitepapers/solaris_port/book1.html

which has some relevant passages; particularly, if you're developing GCC
on Linux then you'll have to be aware of the odd difference in system
call interfaces.

Good luck,
Rup.