Request for Testers: gsoc_nci branch

Andy Dougherty doughera at lafayette.edu
Wed Nov 10 16:54:08 UTC 2010


On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Peter Lobsinger wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Andy Dougherty <doughera at lafayette.edu> wrote:
> > On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Peter Lobsinger wrote:
> >
> >> The gsoc_nci branch is at a point where it should be mergeable. Please
> >> test it on any platforms you happen to care about. 'make test' should
> >> exercise the full functionality, but other variants couldn't hurt
> >  > either.
> >>
> >> Test configurations of interest are (in more or less descending order
> >> of importance):
> >>  * libffi *not* installed
> >
> > Parrot built, and all tests passed for Solaris 10/x86 without libffi.
> 
> Thank you for your efforts.
> 
> > Since libffi assumes gcc, and I don't have gcc installed on that system,
> > this is the only permutation I tested.
> 
> I find that hard to believe. The README explicitly states support for
> MSVC. Also, why would it need to use autoconf if it only supported
> gcc?

Yes, there are undoubtedly some exceptions to my sweeping 
over-generalization. I don't know anything about the Windows build. There 
are also a few other comments sprinkled in the source about AIX, HP, and 
SGI that may or may not be out of date.  I don't know.

What I do know is that I have never gotten it to build with anything other 
than gcc, and the defaults seem to assume gcc.  Here are some specific 
observations:

The autoconf-generated Makefile unconditionally contains gcc-specific 
options, such as:

	AM_CFLAGS = -Wall -g -fexceptions

the header file ffi_common.h contains gcc-specific attributes:

       typedef unsigned int UINT8  __attribute__((__mode__(__QI__)));

Manually fixing those issues,

On Solaris/SPARC, the compilation fails on the asm() statements
in src/sparc/ffi.c with:

    "src/sparc/ffi.c", line 476: syntax error before or at: :

On Solaris/x86, the compilation fails with

    "./include/ffitarget.h", line 88: undefined symbol: FFI_DEFAULT_ABI

I have not pursued it any further.

My conclusion is that there are specific exceptions in the code, but the 
default is to assume gcc.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		doughera at lafayette.edu


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