[PD-dev] Re: GCC errors building devel_0_39

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005, c wrote:

> > Trying to compile
> > devel_0_39 with simd=1 seems to be really, really troublesome with most
> > versions of GCC I encounter.
> definitely odd, ive been able to compile with simd using GCC 3.4.4,
> 4.0.2, 4.1.0-beta20051125

Those are all really recent versions of GCC. I think the problems are 
with late 3.3, early 3.4, early 4.0, all three being slightly older GCC's. 
The problem is that those versions of GCC are still very much in use and 
will continue to be so for over a year.

> most who had the errors were using Fedora and various RedHat
> derivatives, right?

No, I don't really recall all the distros involved, but sure was SuSE 
involved several times: Normand, Alx and I are three SuSE users.

> gentoo does a great job of this ( i have no idea how, but it just always
> works and compilers and glibc upgrades dont break stuff..) to switch
> between gcc's you'd eselect compiler list, then set

(unfinished sentence?)

> if you convinced everyone in your building to install distccd, installs
> would be faster than SuSE

What's that? Something like pymake? Anyhow, you're joking, I've seen
gentoo, and with the small number of linux comps in my home these days, I
can't see Gentoo _not_ taking an awful lot of time to compile.

> this sounds awfully convoluted... SCons has a TryBuild() and other
> methods which could recompile without the offensive SIMD code if the
> compiler crashed...

There's a _big_ problem with that solution: if the compiler crashes in
some place, then most likely the same bug causes some memory corruption
that doesn't make the compiler crash, but instead corrupts the *.o files, 
and then there's nothing scons can do about it because it doesn't know.

At least, if the compiler crashes, the _whole_ build should be retried, 
and there should be a scons option anyway so that the user can override it 
in case corruption happens without a crash for some reason.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada