[gambit-list] Could use hackers to try gambit with development version of gcc
Bradley Lucier
lucier at math.purdue.edu
Wed Oct 31 21:41:40 EDT 2007
Over the years I've spent some time building gambit with development
versions of gcc; the gcc developers have been quite helpful in fixing
bugs and removing inefficiencies uncovered by this testing before the
official releases of gcc. There is some interest in using
automatically-generated C code, like the code that gsc produces, as
"extreme" test cases for gcc's internal algorithms.
Because of the timing of future linux releases, gcc-4.3.0, the next
major release of gcc, will likely go into fedora, Open Suse, and a
few other linux releases. I've started using it to compile gambit
just to see what happens. For example, I found one important loop
that was compiled to significantly slower code by development 4.3.0
than by the released 4.2.2 on x64-64, and I think that this will
likely be fixed before release. Problems that arise in the
development version of gcc that used to work in previous versions are
quite likely to be fixed before release.
I just tried development gcc-4.3.0 on powerpc-apple-darwin8.10.0
(i.e, MacOS X 10.4.10 on powerpc) in 64-bit code and I got a segfault
in the garbage collector when trying to calculate (expt 3 10000000).
(I just tried it in 32-bit code and got segfault in a different place
in the garbage collector.)
Perhaps I'm just feeling older and more tired than usual, but I sure
would feel better if some other people downloaded the svn sources of
gcc, built it, and tried building and testing gambit with it. (I
looked at that GC segfault and the wind just went out of me.)
Instructions for downloading the svn development version of gcc are at
http://gcc.gnu.org/svn.html
under "Using the SVN repository". You'll need to install a
relatively recent version of gmp and mpfr. I build and configure gcc
for the purposes of gcc testing with
../../mainline/configure --prefix=/pkgs/gcc-mainline --enable-
languages=c --enable-checking=release --with-gmp=/pkgs/gmp-4.2.2 --
with-mpfr=/pkgs/gmp-4.2.2
and then
make bootstrap
It's not entirely trivial, but it may be of interest to some people
who are into this kind of thing.
Brad
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