Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!pacbell!att!mtunx!mtune!bakerst!ihtlt!kosman!kevin
From: kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general
Subject: A new (to me) bug in /bin/cc
Message-ID: <425@kosman.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jun 88 08:17:41 GMT
Organization: K.O.'s Manor - Vital Computer Systems, Oxnard, CA 93035
Lines: 19

Yuk!!

I just got the game Nethack, version 2.3, and went to compile this beast.
The make died on the first real source, with an error from *the assembler*!!!

Seems that /bin/cc was putting out 'br.b' instructions when it had no good
reason to think that the destination was close enough.  The assembler had
no choice but to choke.  I looked around, and the problem seemed to be an
assignment to a structure element in a conditional, in such a way that the
next thing to do was leave the current function.  The end of the function
was quite far away.

The problem went away if I set it up to not compile things into bitfields
(this is controlled by the config.h file).

So, the bug has something to do with bitfields in structures.

My questions is: does gnu cc do any better??

Anyone out there compiled nethack with gcc, and selected bitfields???