Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!sdh
From: sdh@thumper.bellcore.com (Retief of the CDT)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: C Compilers/Environments for the MAC SE
Message-ID: <1116@thumper.bellcore.com>
Date: 3 Jun 88 15:40:16 GMT
References: <5968@cup.portal.com> <2978@polyslo.UUCP>
Reply-To: sdh@thumper.UUCP (Steve Hawley)
Organization: Bellcore MRE
Lines: 28

>
>There are also MegaMax, Consulair, and Manx (AztecC).  From the aspect of
>portability, I think that Aztec should be considered; however, if you are going
>to support multiple environments be sure to modularize ANYTHING which is HW
>specific.  I've found that most reasonably written (i.e. they don't make
>assumptions about byte ordering, etc) programs will port over to Aztec and MPW
>almost unchanged and to LSC with little extra effort, but they'll be plug-ugly.
>
I have to disagree with the portability issue here.  I just finished a
substantial project in C for a class at school, and on a lark I moved it to
the Mac.   I had the 9K program up and running EXACTLY as it does on UNIX
within a half hour.

Similarly, I moved a one-pass assembler from UNIX to the Mac and that took a
couple hours (this was due to a bug in LSC's malloc that has since been
corrected).

Finally, last year I worked on porting a 27K line window manager from the Sun
to the Mac.  It took 2 weeks (mostly due to rewriting the bitblit code to
be upwardly Mac compatible).  As a benchmark: compiling in from scratch on the
Mac took just under 4:20.  On the Sun it takes > 16:00.  Sompare the clock
rates on the machines and you will be pleasantly surprised.

LSC is also about 10 times faster than the compiler on our 750 at school.

Steve Hawley
sdh@bellcore.com
hawley@oberlin.edu