[RFC] Unexpected compiler twist of the wcscoll issue

[Paolo Carlini]

Hi,

as probably many of you already know, we are experiencing some problems making
use of glibc2.2's wcscoll in implementing v3 collate::compare.

Very unexpectedly, on my system (i686-pc-linux-gnu, glibc2.2.5) at least, this
turns out to have to do with the compiler!

Consider this simple testcase, provided by Peter (Schmid).

#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
  int i;
  setlocale(LC_ALL, "de_DE");
  i = wcscoll (L"Äuglein", L"Augment");
  printf("result of the wide string comparison: %i\n", i);
  i = strcoll ("Äuglein", "Augment");
  printf("result of the string comparison: %i\n", i);
  return 0;
}

This is what I get:

3.0.4, 3.1 pre, 3.2 exp:
------------------------
result of the wide string comparison: 20
result of the string comparison: -1

2.95.3 + patches, 2.96 RH, Intel 5.0.1 :
----------------------------------------
result of the wide string comparison: -1
result of the string comparison: -1

Is anyone able to reproduce/explain this, on different architectures perhaps?

Thanks,
Paolo.