Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!7103_300
From: 7103_300@uwovax.uwo.ca (Eric Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Comment on PD/Shareware C compiler
Message-ID: <2151@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 1 May 89 10:41:20 GMT
References: <1810@orion.cf.uci.edu>
Lines: 25
Organisation: University of Western Ontario, Canada

In article <1810@orion.cf.uci.edu>, jtang@orion.cf.uci.edu (James Tang) writes:
> I am looking for a C compiler.  So far I have come across MJC 2.0, GCC-134, 
> and Sozoban compiler. (MJC - Mark Johnson C)  Anyone care to comment on each
> of the C compiler?  It's overall performence, versatility, and compatibility.

I haven't used MJC2.0, but I wasn't too impressed by an earlier version, which
had a very minimalist feel and was missing most of the preprocessor (that
should be fixed now, I'm sure). Sozobon seems to be OK. If you've got the
memory, though, get the GCC. It's definitely the best C compiler for the
ST that I've seen. I did some benchmarks on Sozobon, Laser, and the GCC,
and the rankings were pretty consistently GCC > Sozobon > Laser, except for
compilation speed (Laser is incredibly fast). Also, the GCC is ANSI compliant,
although the library that comes with it isn't (Jwahar Bammi and I have
written a new library that will be out soon and that fixes this).

The major drawback of the GCC is the memory requirements. It will run
(barely) on a 1040, but for serious work with it you need 2 Megs of memory
and a hard disk. I have a Mega 2, and I still run across programs that
the optimizer runs out of memory on.
--
Eric R. Smith                      email:
Dept. of Mathematics               7103_300@uwovax.uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario      7103_300@uwovax.bitnet
London, Ont. Canada N6A 5B7    (a shared mailbox: put my name on
ph: (519) 661-3638              the Subj: line, please!)