Rumours about "new" U*IX ? (mild flames)

[Michael Meissner]

In article <62062 at bbn.BBN.COM> fkittred at bbn.com (Fletcher Kittredge)
writes:

| In article <1991Jan13.070816.24882 at ircam.fr> fingerhu at ircam.fr (Michel Fingerhut) writes:
| >4.  What about the *reliability* of OSF/1 tools?  *If* I am not mistaken, their
| >    compiler is derived from gcc, which has known problems with DEC/MIPS archi-
| >    tecture, and provides less debugging options than cc (which has some
| >    problems too). (Is this why Jim Gettys says "We certainly ran large piles
| >    of exiting executable we have here "... )
| >       ^^^^^^^
| 
| Well, you are mistaken.  If you had been following gcc on the MIPS systems
| at all, you would have noticed over the last year a stream of high quality
| patches for gcc for DEC RISC systems emerging out of Michael Meissner at
| OSF.  In fact, the DECStation is one of the OSF's reference ports for OSF/1.

Flattery will get you everywhere :-)

| As for less debugging options, I don't believe you.  There are many more
| error checking and debugging options for gcc than for MIPS cc.  However, I
| am open to persuasion, could you list the debugging options available with
| MIPS cc and not with the gcc OSF ships?
| 
| In addition, DEC will probably offer both compilers on their Ultrix-OSF/1
| merge.

Let me try to add some light to the discussion.  Note that I'm
speaking for Michael Meissner here, not for OSF and/or DEC in any
offical capacity.

The OSF/1 tapes that we ship contain GCC as a reference compiler on
the Free Software Foundation tape (ie, GCC is not offically a part of
OSF/1, which means a vendor can supply his/her own compilers).  In
order to better support our shared libraries, we use a new object file
format called OSF/rose.  At present, we use the normal Berkeley style
.STABS for debugging support, which means the debug support is
equivalent to what you get elsewhere.  As part of my changes to GCC, I
did also supply debug support for the vendor supplied ECOFF debug
format.  This involved writing a cover program for the assembler which
ran the real assembler and stuffed the debug information into the
object file (the MIPS assembler provides no way to pass symbolic debug
information).  The codegen changes that I did were incorportated into
revision 1.38 of GCC, but the 'new' features, such as debug support
are being delayed until revision 2.00 at the behest of the FSF.

I can't say whether DEC will support both compilers or not, or what
object file format they will use.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?