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>
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Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
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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
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