Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!vg
From: vg@csri.toronto.edu (Victor Greenberg)
Subject: Aztec C Problems
Message-ID: <8808131413.AA16229@gerrard.csri.toronto.edu>
Keywords: Manx, sdb, debugger
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
References: <15112@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <2669@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Distribution: na
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 88 08:53:58 EDT

>>Has anybody bought Aztec's source debugger, and what do they have to say about it?
>
>So here's the good news and the bad news: sdb runs well on limited memory
>machines, WHEN IT RUNS.
>
>Unfortunately, sdb is amazingly buggy. In my first hour with it, I must
>have crashed my machine at least 10 times! I have even generated
>files which crash sdb when it just tries to open it! (This took
>all of another hour before I hit it.)

Our copy of Aztec C (the latest version, 3.6 I think) arrived a few days
ago.  I spent a day trying to use it, then gave up and went back to MPW C
(which, although incredibly slow at compilation, is a solid package which
works).

The first thing I did after opening the shrink wrap was to copy by hand
all of the files onto my hard disk, into a directory called Aztec.
The package did not work very well.  Make didn't work (it would do a
lot of disk accesses, but not execute any commands) and the C compiler
would dump garbage into its output if you tried to redirect its error
messages.

Finally, I deleted the aztec environment from my disk, and reinstalled it
from scratch, using the provided installation program.  This fixed up
the problems described above, leaving me with these:
 - If I invoke the C compiler from the MPW shell and use -i to specify
   an include directory, #include doesn't search the specified directory.
   (But cc works fine if you invoke it from the Aztec shell)
 - You can't redirect the output of make when it is invoked from the
   Aztec shell; eg:  make all >error.log
   The redirection is ignored, and all of the error messages are sent to
   the console, and scroll off the top of the screen before you can read
   them.
 - If my screen saver (Moire) kicks in, then the Aztec shell cannot
   redraw the screen, and often crashes the system.

I finally decided that, if I had this much trouble just trying to
compile a program, then the compiler itself is probably not to be
trusted either.  Has anyone else had these problems, or discovered
a solution?