Suggestions

[Stewart Brodie]

In message <Marcel-1.53-0425113426-b496#xE at druck.freeuk.com>
          "David J. Ruck" <druck at freeuk.com> wrote:

> On Tue 25 Apr, Tony van der Hoff wrote:
> > On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, at 23:24:29, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote on
> > the subject "Suggestions":
> > 
> > > Well Norcroft is very much maintained, you just don't get new versions
> > > unless you pay ARM a lot of money ;-) I'd say it's still used by the
> > > majority of Acorn developers as it is still an excellent C89 compiler.
> > 
> > 1. Is it maintained as a RISC OS compiler? I believe not.

You believe wrong.  The RISC OS hosted Norcroft C compiler still exists,
is still maintained (by me), and is still used to build RISC OS by us ...

> As long as RISC OS are using it to build the OS it is very much relevant.

... and them.  It would be nice to do another more public release some time,
but that's very much out of my hands.

> Infact several different versions have to be used to do an OS build, due to
> little querks.

Is that so?  I'd be interested to know where you got that information from,
because, as one of the people responsible for the RISC OS toolchain here,
I've removed all the non-latest versions of the tools from our library
directory and we have no trouble building any OS releases with a single
version of each tool.

There is one source file in one component that used to be compiled with cc
4.00 because somebody erroneously thought that a compiler bug in 5.xx caused
it to be built wrong.  On investigation, it turned out that that somebody had
prototyped an external function locally and called it, but had actually given
an incorrect prototype (a parameter was missing!).  Due to quirks in the
register allocations in the 4.00 code generator, they got away with it
because the argument register happened to contain a safe value at the point
of procedure call.

> > 2. It is an excellent compiler, albeit a bit long in the tooth, but that
> > doesn't matter. I believe that Norcroft *is* falling into disuse on this
> > platform (because the average person can't buy it?) as people migrate
> > onto gcc and c++. I could be wrong, and probably am ;-)
> 
> The average person may be going for gcc these days because its free.
> However developers are using Norcroft and will continue to do so
> indefinately.

Not least because, at least last time I looked, gcc cannot do module code. 
Besides, the gcc ARM code generation is not as good as the Norcroft compiler
in many cases.

-- 
Stewart Brodie, Senior Software Engineer (Views expressed are my own and
Pace Micro Technology plc                 not those of my employer)
645 Newmarket Road
Cambridge, CB5 8PB, United Kingdom       WWW: http://www.pacemicro.com/