Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!santra!news From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Bugginess of compilers (Was: Re: DICE vs GCC) Message-ID: <1991Apr7.172821.13328@santra.uucp> Date: 7 Apr 91 17:28:21 GMT References: <9104021420.AA10848@thunder.LakeheadU.Ca> <1991Apr4.034920.16298@marlin.jcu.edu.au> <1991Apr4.180217.19773@nntp-server.caltech.edu> <1991Apr5.030228.28756@marlin.jcu.edu.au> <966@boing.UUCP> Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system) Reply-To: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland Lines: 29 In-Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) In article <966@boing.UUCP>, dale@boing (Dale Luck) writes: >Up until 5.04 there were too many bugs in SAS/C to compiler X source code, >however after 5.04 became available we finally were able to ram the >client source code through SAS/C. >But still Some of these exist in the 5.10a compiler. All we can do as >companies with products on the market that depend on compilers is to help the >companies find the bugs and hope they have timely fixes. SAS has proven to >me that they support their product and that is one of the reasons we recommend >SAS/C for people doing X11 programming on the Amiga. I find it silly that after that much bad experience with a broken compiler you still stick with it, especially concerning that there's an excellent compiler like gcc available with source. I don't know how well SAS fixes bugs, but if the compiler as buggy as you tell and it still takes several revisions to get the bugs fixed, sounds like the FSF makes a lot better job at it. Also, with gcc you have the alternative of fixing the possible bugs yourself; you are not the mercy of the compiler vendor with the only remedy to just 'hope' that they will fix the bugs. Using gcc on the amiga of course might require writing some libraries which are usually provided by the Amiga compiler vendors; some of this has been done (freely distributable, also) - but I'd suspect that doing that wouldn't be as hard as struggling to get perfectly working code thru a broken compiler. //Jyrki