gcc and g++ compilers

[James Van Artsdalen]

In <6348 at turnkey.gryphon.COM>, jackv at turnkey.gryphon.COM (Jack F. Vogel) wrote:

> First off I am running ISC 2.0.1 on a 20Mhz system with 3 Meg of memory.
> I have successfully built gcc, but it has some problems. Mainly it
> is SLOW!!!, it seems that when the pass gcc-cc1 runs it hangs the whole
> system for quite a while, I do not know if it grabs so much memory that
> everything else is swapped out or what.

What version of gcc?  How was it built?  I hope you didn't try to use
the portable alloca() floating around - it can consume enormous
amounts of memory.

With only 3meg of memory, it is very likely that things are getting
swapped.  In addition, function inlining can make gcc grow
tremendously.  One file in X has a function which calls another
function several hundred times.  gcc-cc1 consumed 14meg of virtual
space inlining all of those function calls...

gcc 1.35 works quite well, with the biggest complain being the lack of
PCC compatible struct returns.  I know of no bugs in 1.35.96, so the
1.36 version should be quite good.  Keep in mind that the goal of gcc
is to produce good programs, not to run quicker than other compilers,
and there is a price to be paid for portability.

> It does this even compiling some simple little "hello world" type
> program.

Buy more memory.  Don't even consider stuff like X until you do.

> Secondly, I have tried to build the g++ compiler and had even less success.

I don't think g++ is well ported to the 386 yet.  I know of a couple
of people who have done it, and neither recommend it unless you're
really serious about doing some hacking on it.  In particular the
g++ libraries are still BSD dependent I understand.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james at raid.dell.com       "Live Free or Die"
DCC Corporation       9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759       512-338-8789