Re: Programming on an Alpha (Redhat of course...)

["Brian E.W. Wood" <beww intac com>]

On 03-May-98 Michal Jaegermann wrote:
>> 
>>     I have noticed as I try to compile programs on my Alpha that they
>> regularly get errors but on my Intel box they don't.
> 
> Most likely these get errors because they have bugs.  Faulty assumptions
> that int can hold a pointer, for example, are masked on Intel due
> to relative sizes of these types on Intel but they bite on Alpha.
> As C defaults undeclared (or arguments to functions without prototypes)
> this sometimes may be hard to spot.  Misaligned stack due to
> carelessnes with types is also not unheard of.
> 
>> Could someone point me
>> toward some resources about programming on the Alpha.
> 
> K&R, second edition, is recommended - and pay attention to what authors
> have to say.  Using -Wall with gcc, and even stricter available checks,
> also helps a lot.

I tried to reply to the original author of this thread but the message bounced
with user unknown.

The comments above are quite valid, but I noticed that the original message
referred to C++ code, which is pretty broken on RH 5.0/Alpha with gcc/g++.

I'd suggest checking out egcs (latest version 1.0.2), which seems to do a lot
better with c++ code. There are egcs RPMs at
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/hurricane

Compiling yourself from source is of course better, the compiler bootstraps and
compiles itself.

egcs compiled all of KDE beta4 for me, which is a pretty good c++ workout.

Just my $0.02.

---
Brian E.W. Wood  beww@intac.com