Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!spdcc!merk!alliant!rosenkra
From: rosenkra@Alliant.COM (Bill Rosenkranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: C compilers on the ST
Message-ID: <1961@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Date: 14 Jun 88 06:39:16 GMT
References: <2542@ihuxy.ATT.COM> <1395@megamax.UUCP> <2543@ihuxy.ATT.COM> <1904@alliant.Alliant.COM> <360@piring.cwi.nl>
Reply-To: rosenkra@alliant.UUCP (Bill Rosenkranz)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Littleton, MA
Lines: 44

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In article <360@piring.cwi.nl> steven@cwi.nl (or try mcvax!steven.uucp) writes:
->In article <1904@alliant.Alliant.COM> I wrote:
->> i guess i'll stick with good 'ol alcyon (maybe slow but it works...)
->
->Ha! After months of fighting the buggy code produced by Alcyon, I
->threw the damned thing away and went over to MWC. I only wished I'd
->done it earlier, and saved all that trouble.
->

well, what can i say...MWC was not around until about a year into my investment
of time,time,time. and when it did come out, it was probably worse (v1.x) and
lacked a lot of the things i needed anyway.

v2.x of MWC was better, but still not worth me throwing out (or trying to
convert) 30-40,000 lines of my own alcyon code as well as maybe another 60,000
lines of PD stuff that DOES work. i more or less like my current environment
which centers on alcyon.

your argument failed to include what could be your strongest argument: MWC
is evolving, alcyon is dead (though if ST sales wane, i doubt MWC will see
any more enhancements either :^).

i don't know what kind of stuff you write but at this point, i can easily
debug alcyon and have only found very few (and far between) actual bugs in the
compiler. it does have its limitations, mainly in the user interface area
(can't redir output, cp68 -I does not work like a unix compiler cpp would,
won't accept "/" in include files - does MWC do this? - etc). considering it
has been around for so long in basically it's original  form, it is still a 
good compiler. i wrote my own cc front end and have very few problems. the
library is very unix-like and those routines which did not work corectly i
replaced. 

i often convert comp.sources.unix stuff to run under a gulam shell and find
that generally, the port requires ST-specific changes, not alcyon-specific
changes. i'm sure you can say the same for MWC.

there are a lot of us who still use alcyon, and like it. i will probably
buy MWC 3.x as well, once i get my personal libc makefile built :^). enjoy
your compiler but don't mislead everyone else.

adios...

-bill