SUN4 / SUNOS4.0 / C Compiler Problems

[Terry Domae]

I would like to thank everyone who came back with positive responses on
this subject.  Apparently there were many responses that I got back from
people within sun, but the customer support department in SUN seems to be
overloaded.  I got the following information from all the responses, and
might be of interest to the general list:

 1) There is a new compiler available from sun in the release 4.0.1
    which corrects ``many problems''.  According to SUN customer support
    this is available starting in the first few weeks of Dec88.  This goes
    for the Optimizer too which had some serious flaws accoring to SUN
    customer support.

 2) There is a kernel workaround to the hardware bugs in the 4/110 also
    available in the 4.0.1 release.  The module changed is trap.o, thus
    user programs cannot crash the machine in spite of C programatic
    errors.

 3) The graph program suffers from a compiler bug, functions which
    return floats do not convert their values to double (as it is suppose
    to).  There are patch tapes available from SUN for graph.

 4) SUN support, nor any one else could summarize the problems with the
    compiler.

Terry Domae <domae at nrtc.northorp.com>
Northrop Reaserch and Technology Center
One Research Park
Palos Verdes, Ca.  90274