Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ihnp4!upba!eecae!mailrus!um-math!hyc From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: C compilers on the ST Message-ID: <359@clio.math.lsa.umich.edu> Date: 14 Jun 88 19:26:27 GMT References: <2542@ihuxy.ATT.COM> <1395@megamax.UUCP> <2543@ihuxy.ATT.COM> <1904@alliant.Alliant.COM> <360@piring.cwi.nl> <1961@alliant.Alliant.COM> Sender: usenet@math.lsa.umich.edu Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor Lines: 71 UUCP-Path: {mailrus,umix}!um-math!hyc In article <1961@alliant.Alliant.COM> rosenkra@alliant.UUCP (Bill Rosenkranz) writes: %----- %In article <360@piring.cwi.nl> steven@cwi.nl (or try mcvax!steven.uucp) writes: %->In article <1904@alliant.Alliant.COM> I wrote: %->> i guess i'll stick with good 'ol alcyon (maybe slow but it works...) %-> %->Ha! After months of fighting the buggy code produced by Alcyon, I %->threw the damned thing away and went over to MWC. I only wished I'd %->done it earlier, and saved all that trouble. %-> % %well, what can i say...MWC was not around until about a year into my investment %of time,time,time. and when it did come out, it was probably worse (v1.x) and %lacked a lot of the things i needed anyway. Glad I missed that. I jumped into things with 2.0. % %v2.x of MWC was better, but still not worth me throwing out (or trying to %convert) 30-40,000 lines of my own alcyon code as well as maybe another 60,000 %lines of PD stuff that DOES work. i more or less like my current environment %which centers on alcyon. I dunno, looking at code written for alcyon reminded me too much of looking at something written for a bad C compiler I remember from MSDOS days. Yeah, that's it, it reminded me of Microsoft Fortran-77 and such. Manually invoked compile & link phases, weird command line switches to the linker, etc. Bleah. % %your argument failed to include what could be your strongest argument: MWC %is evolving, alcyon is dead (though if ST sales wane, i doubt MWC will see %any more enhancements either :^). Well, here's hoping that things continue to improve. Now that I've got the 3.0 compiler, I'm thinking about porting Gnu's GCC anyway though, so mebbe it won't matter... % %i don't know what kind of stuff you write but at this point, i can easily %debug alcyon and have only found very few (and far between) actual bugs in the %compiler. it does have its limitations, mainly in the user interface area %(can't redir output, cp68 -I does not work like a unix compiler cpp would, %won't accept "/" in include files - does MWC do this? - etc). considering it %has been around for so long in basically it's original form, it is still a %good compiler. i wrote my own cc front end and have very few problems. the %library is very unix-like and those routines which did not work corectly i %replaced. Yeah, include files were always a pain. I seem to recall that the '/' didn't get recognized. I always had to #ifdef 'em to something else... % %i often convert comp.sources.unix stuff to run under a gulam shell and find %that generally, the port requires ST-specific changes, not alcyon-specific %changes. i'm sure you can say the same for MWC. I've got Gulam, but I'm already too used to MWC's msh to switch over. Mebbe I'll wise up. (msh's attempt at a history mechanism is poor, at best.) I get a lot of Unix code running on my ST as well. Ported Larn 12.0 using MWC 2.0. (Has anyone ported compress yet? I started, since I just finished with ARC, but haven't gotten it working yet.) On the whole, the Mark Williams libraries have been pretty good at emulating Unix. % %there are a lot of us who still use alcyon, and like it. i will probably %buy MWC 3.x as well, once i get my personal libc makefile built :^). enjoy %your compiler but don't mislead everyone else. Oh yeah - you can also get the source for Mark Williams' libraries for a fee. I haven't yet, but plan to. Ah well. From the glimpse I got at alcyon via the UUPC sources, (which I tried vainly to fit into the MWC scheme of things on my system for a couple days...), I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like the system, and I *do* like MWC. I s'pose ya have to say "to each his own," but it'd be nice if there was a standard. It'd make the sources newsgroup a little more useful, f'r'instance.... -- / /_ , ,_. Howard Chu / /(_/(__ University of Michigan / Computing Center College of LS&A ' Unix Project Information Systems