egcs/Solaris status

[Dimitri Papadopoulos]

Igor Markov wrote:
> 
>   Dimitri,
> 
>    several things:
>    our sysadmin was able to build 2.95.1 on Solaris 2.7 with CC5.0
>    We can compile and link our code, but it seg faults on trivial
>    code (I posted a ridiculous 4-liner to gcc-bugs), so we are
>    probably going to roll back to 2.95.

I don't get segfaults with your 4-liner. The cause may well be that
you are mixing Sun as/ld when buidling GCC and GNU as/ld when building
your programs which has caused me a lot of trouble... I had exactly
the same problems. This one wouldn't even link:
	cout << endl;

Otherwise, I was able to build GCC with EGCS for use with GNU as/ld
_and_ Sun as/ld. However it took me a few days of tests and
modifications. I still don't understand why a build works or not. It
depends on many factors:
- GNU as/ld are in the PATH or not when buidling GCC.
- Sun as/ld are in the PATH or not when buidling GCC.
- The compiler used to bootstrap internally uses GNU as/ld or not
  (this is relevant for EGCS/GCC compilers only, for they may use
  GNU as/ld without as/ld being in the PATH).
- GNU as/ld are in the PATH or not when using GCC.
- Sun as/ld are in the PATH or not when using GCC.
I don't have time to test all combinations.

>    Earlier, we installed binutils -- when we saw that gcc does not
>    work well with Sun's ld, we decided not to try to fix that.

That's not an option for me. There are people out there who use EGCS
with Sun as/ld and I want to be able to exchange shared objects with
them. It's really a problem that EGCS/GCC produce their own format
of shared objects on Solaris, instead of sticking to the Solaris
standard format.

>    I don't think you can expect to ever link C++ libs compiled with
>    CC and with g++ because they seem to have vastly different ways
>    to process templates (each offer 3-4 options, but non-default
>    options either aren't working on our code, e.g., -frepo or lead
>    to unacceptable code bloat, e.g., w SunCC).

Of course I don't expect C++ programs compiled by different compilers
to interoperate. That's not even a question of templates. I have never
written that I expect CC and g++ to interoperate.

>    So, my question is -- what (how many) patches did you install for CC
>    (you mentioned fully patched) ?

I have installed all the Workshop patches recommended by Sun:
	http://access1.sun.com/workshop/current-patches.html
These are
	server patches for building 32-bits programs
		107289-03
		107295-01
		107311-05
		107354-01
		107355-02
		107357-03
		107740-01
		107742-01
	server patches for building 64-bits programs
		107358-02
		107390-04
	Solaris 7 client patches for building and running 32-bits programs
		106327-05
		106748-02
	Solaris 7 client patches for building and running 64-bits programs
		106300-06
		107058-01
Note that their C++ front-end is badly broken even after adding all
these patches...

>    2.95 seemed to work fine on Solaris 2.6 (we upgraded recently to 2.7
>    and did not try 2.95 here).

All software seem to work fine until you have problems... After a few days
struggling to install it, the compiler seemed to work fine indeed, until I
started getting segfaults in Qt, which works like a charm with EGCS, with
other compilers or on other platforms. The problem may well be that I must
use -fno-strict-aliasing as Alexandre Oliva pointed out.

Dimitri