Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!uokmax!servalan!ben
From: ben@servalan.uucp (Ben Mesander)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Query for the Net
Summary: GNU C vs. SAS C
Keywords: SAS C is not as good as GCC in some senses.
Message-ID: <1990Nov16.201320.4842@servalan.uucp>
Date: 16 Nov 90 20:13:20 GMT
References: <1990Nov6.155810.20604@intelhf.hf.intel.com> <90311.140732UH2@psuvm.psu.edu> <1990Nov12.154623.2287@clinet.fi> <21683@well.sf.ca.us>
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Organization: Ministry of Silly Walks
Lines: 44

In article <21683@well.sf.ca.us> farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) writes:
>dix@clinet.fi (Risto Kaivola) writes:
>>There may be some compatibility problems with SAS (former
>>Lattice) C, but there is no way Lattice could match the
>>price/performance ratio offered by GCC. GCC comes free.
>
>Your price/performance ratio will zoom to infinity the first time a bug
>appears, or you need to do something which is just the other side of what
>the compiler will allow.  Us Lattice/SAS folks, however, will just have
>to pick up the phone...
>
>GCC comes free.  Support comes expensive.

GCC has proven itself reliable enough to be shipped as the standard C 
compiler on several major UNIX platforms. Obviously, doing stuff like
__chip is impossible with GNU CC (mybe with atom, though?). However,
I bought Lattice and now the SAS upgrade. I have yet to find a non-trivial
program that the optimizer works on, I constantly hit compiler limits and
bugs, I have had it spit up mysterious internal error messages that are not
in the manual, I have repeatedly found bugs in the library routines, the
code generation is only fair, and the library is inadequate for my needs.
In short, if I called SAS whenever I had a problem with thier compiler or
library, I'd be broke.

On the other hand, GCC does not have the official 'support', but GNU does
a pretty good job. GCC is hard on machine resources - it uses a lot of 
memory, and disk space. I understand it takes 3 megs of memory for it to
be able to compile itself. It is slow on a 68000 Amiga. On the plus side, 
it generates excellent code, although I'm stuck with the Lattice/SAS
library plus my own attempts at enlarging it and replacing buggy routines.

I'll probably continue to do development with SAS, and compile the production
code with GCC. GCC is a _much_better_ C compiler, although it is not
Amiga-specific. I can't port a lot of UNIX code with SAS. Hopefully, the
GCC port will become a bit more polished (better front end than the PDC
hack) soon.

They both have thier good and bad points, but you're wrong in many ways
about SAS C. It's a poor compiler compared to GCC. Support for SAS is there,
but it shouldn't need as much support as it does. I suspect that SAS has
many more bugs left in it for me to find, and GCC has a lot fewer.

>Mike Farren 				     farren@well.sf.ca.us
ben@epmooch.UUCP