Re: [MiNT] C++ Stuff

[Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk>]

On Sat, 2009-02-14 at 20:06 -0500, Mark Duckworth wrote:
> Vincent Rivière wrote:
> > Mark Duckworth wrote:
> >>  It simply just kills aranym with a bus error no matter what I set 
> >> the stack to (32K, 64, etc).
> >
> > On my ARAnyM setup, I have g++ 2.95.3 and binutils 2.18.
> > I reproduced more or less the same bug as you. Instead of displaying 
> > the substring, the programs displays the whole memory, so obviously 
> > the string we want to display contains a bad pointer. That looks like 
> > a g++ bug, they are usually very hard to isolate (and I'm not going to 
> > spend my time on gcc 2.95.3).
> >
> > > Maybe I should just upgrade to the later versions and we should stop
> > > using 2.95.3 already.
> >
> > Personally, I feel very comfortable with cross-compilation. From 
> > Windows, you can edit your C/C++ programs with Visual Studio, then 
> > compile in a Cygwin window, and if your build dir is mounted in the 
> > ARAnyM filesystem, you just have to do Alt+TAB to switch to ARAnyM and 
> > run your program inside TOSWIN/bash.
> >
> > Furthermore, a cross-compiler running on a supported gcc host (Cygwin 
> > or Linux) has potentially less bugs than a native gcc running on 
> > unsupported host (MiNT). Hopefully, compilers use very few system 
> > functions (mainly file I/O), so the potential bugs due to the 
> > unsupported host are somehow limited.
> >
> > The problem is that we didn't manage to make a clean native build of 
> > GCC 4.X, with RPM packages. Some experimental binaries have been built 
> > by some people. As far as I remember, MiKRO managed to build a native 
> > gcc 4.3.2 on 04/10/2008. He will certainly share his binaries with you 
> > if you want to experiment.
> >
> > Note: the problem with the gcc is the size of its sourcecode. It takes 
> > literally hours to build a cross-compiler on a recent machine. For 
> > building it from ARAnyM, it takes more, more time... So debugging the 
> > build scripts and fixing build problems requires to have a huge amount 
> > of time and patience.
> >
> Ok, well I guess I will work on it.  Since we don't even have a working 
> g++ compiler right now even though this 2.95.3 setup has been around for 
> years, obviously we can suitably replace it without worrying.  Binutils 
> has been updated years ago to 2.18 by Keith Scroggins and I.  Somehow 
> though it's not in sparemint.  I'm not sure why.  I think we need a 
> formal submission process for sparemint.  Right now we upload packages 
> and Frank if he's available goes over them but this really isn't working 
> now nor was it back then.  It's part of the reason I got discouraged and 
> didn't bother anymore.  I can find all my build scripts but I trust 
> yours better.  I'm pretty good at making RPM's from these though, and 
> there are a number of ways to cheat the RPM build process so that you 
> can fix bugs incrementally rather than restarting the build process.  
> Building rpm's of things like gcc mainly involves sending alerts to 
> yourself so hours later when something finishes you get an SMS letting 
> you know.  Makes it easier.

Mark,

I've already spent a lot of time getting Gentoo up. I can put my GCC
4.2.4 binaries up for you to try ?

Alan.