Re: How to test compiler and create messaged based on version of gcc?

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Philip Herron wrote:
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> Hi
>
> Its a shame you haven't had success on building with other compilers
> you say about gcc 4.0.0 being too buggy, you mean the compiler or your
> program comes out buggy? If thats the case your definitely going to
> need to look at your sources in my opinion gcc is a very nice compiler
> making very safe code. And other compilers may not be so nice.

I'm told by the main Sage developer, that gcc 4.0.0 does not work. There 
was only tonight a report of someone failing to build Sage and when 
asked the compiler version, was told it was 4.0.0

I've built Sage with gcc 4.2.4 and with gcc 4.4.0 myself ok.

To my knowledge, nobody has seriously tried building Sage with a 
compiler other than gcc. But there are bound to be some GNU-isms that 
prevent the Sun compiler from building Sage. However, I intend working 
on that, so it will build with the Sun compiler.

At the minute, the Sage configure script will not even allow one to try, 
as it exits. I bypassed that, but there are several bits in Sage which 
blow up if the compiler is not gcc.

> For a configure.ac you could write something like:
>
> AC_PREREQ(2.59)
> AC_INIT(<name>, <version>,  <bug-report>)
> AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([...])
> AC_CONFIG_HEADER([...])
> #if you want to use more macros
> AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
>
> # Checks for programs.
> AC_PROG_CC_C99
> AC_PROG_CXX
> AC_PROG_RANLIB
>
> AC_PROG_INSTALL
> AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
> AM_PROG_CC_C_O
>
> AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile
>                                  src/Makefile])
> AC_OUTPUT
>
> That would be a basic outline of a configure.ac but not that usefull.
> I put in AC_PROG_CC_C99 as it useful and i only found it recently and
> auto puts -std=gnu99 on your gcc line anyways.

I've noticed std=gnu99 when the compiler is not gcc. The Sun compiler 
then complains. It could be a badly written configure script, but I've 
seen this warning from the Sun compiler.

> you could add in the check:
>
> if test x$CC = xgcc ; then

Thank you, that looks like what I want.

> #this is very likely to fail and is a bad way to do it :S
>     #VERSION=`gcc --version | grep gcc | awk {'print $4'}`
>     #so using that macro should do the trick chuck that macro
>     #into the m4 dir mentioned at the top and do
>     VERSION=AX_GCC_VERSION   
>     #Not too sure if you can do less than or gt on that but you could
> give it ago :)
> elif
>     AC_MSG_ERROR(not gcc)
> fi
>
> But if your seriously want to do this i would make sure you can
> compile your code with gcc 4 at least before considering trying with
> sun-studio it took me a good while to get used to using them.
>
> Anyways good luck sage is pretty powerful :)

I've never really used it, but have put a lot of work in porting it to 
Solaris. Although it does build on Solaris, it is far from trivual and 
there are still some remaining issues. Two of the three issues should be 
fixed within less than a month, as new versions of ECL and Maxima will 
be released, which means ECL will build on Solaris and that Maxima will 
not break on ECL (the latest ECL in CVS detects an error in Maxima. But 
that has now been fixed and a new release of Maxima will be out very soon.)


Dave