GCC 3.1 released

GCC 3.1 released

[Steve Sangwine]

The GCC website reports release of GCC 3.1 on 15 May (yesterday). As
has been noted in comp.lang.ada before, 3.1 includes the Ada
'front-end' as they call it, known to us as Gnat.

Would Robert Dewar be prepared to say anything about future releases
of Gnat public versions now that we have reached this historic point?

Steve Sangwine
University of Essex, UK.

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[chris.danx]

"Steve Sangwine" <sjs@essex.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:3ce3a7de.6340210@news.essex.ac.uk...
> The GCC website reports release of GCC 3.1 on 15 May (yesterday). As
> has been noted in comp.lang.ada before, 3.1 includes the Ada
> 'front-end' as they call it, known to us as Gnat.

What is the status of GNAT in gcc 3.1?  Will it build on Windows and are
there any outstanding issues?

Just curious,
Chris

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Robert Dewar]

"chris.danx" <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com> wrote in message news:<IbOE8.2475$UR2.260071@news11-gui.server.ntli.net>...
> "Steve Sangwine" <sjs@essex.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:3ce3a7de.6340210@news.essex.ac.uk...
> > The GCC website reports release of GCC 3.1 on 15 May (yesterday). As
> > has been noted in comp.lang.ada before, 3.1 includes the Ada
> > 'front-end' as they call it, known to us as Gnat.
> 
> What is the status of GNAT in gcc 3.1?  Will it build on Windows and are
> there any outstanding issues?


It will build on windows and many other targets. There are
known problems on all targets, but this version is in
fairly good shape at least for fiddling around with!

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Bobby D. Bryant]

On Thu, 16 May 2002 16:08:52 -0600, Robert Dewar wrote:

> "chris.danx" <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:<IbOE8.2475$UR2.260071@news11-gui.server.ntli.net>...
>> "Steve Sangwine" <sjs@essex.ac.uk> wrote in message
>> news:3ce3a7de.6340210@news.essex.ac.uk...
>> > The GCC website reports release of GCC 3.1 on 15 May
>> > (yesterday). As has been noted in comp.lang.ada before, 3.1
>> > includes the Ada 'front-end' as they call it, known to us as
>> > Gnat.
>> 
>> What is the status of GNAT in gcc 3.1?  Will it build on Windows
>> and are there any outstanding issues?
> 
> 
> It will build on windows and many other targets. There are known
> problems on all targets, but this version is in fairly good shape
> at least for fiddling around with!

FWIW, right after they forked the 3.1 branch I downloaded it and
tried it out, and it seemed to work just fine on the various
programs that I'm actively maintaining right now.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Adrian Knoth]

Bobby D. Bryant <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

[gcc-3.1 and Ada]
> it seemed to work just fine on the various programs 

But keep in mind that there _are_ problems, really.

-- 
mail: adi@thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP: v2-key via keyserver

Mit Apachen ist gut quatschen

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Bobby D. Bryant]

On Sat, 18 May 2002 03:22:16 -0600, Adrian Knoth wrote:

> Bobby D. Bryant <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> 
> [gcc-3.1 and Ada]
>> it seemed to work just fine on the various programs 
> 
> But keep in mind that there _are_ problems, really.

Thanks.  I haven't switched over yet.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Jeffrey Creem]

Yup..There are problems.. There are also problems in GNAT 3.14, 3.13, 3.12,
3.15 ... etc.

I am not trying to minimize the issues in the 3.1 release (or say the other
GNAT releases are bad!)
however there are always problems in all releases.

Also, there were a few patches in the days just before the final 3.1 release
so if you have
an older pre 3.1 release snapshot or CVS snapshot, be sure to grab the
actual 3.1 release


"Adrian Knoth" <adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de> wrote in message
news:slrnaec7a8.gou.adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de...
> Bobby D. Bryant <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
>
> [gcc-3.1 and Ada]
> > it seemed to work just fine on the various programs
>
> But keep in mind that there _are_ problems, really.
>
> --
> mail: adi@thur.de  http://adi.thur.de PGP: v2-key via keyserver
>
> Mit Apachen ist gut quatschen

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Adrian Knoth]

Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote:

> Also, there were a few patches in the days just before the final 3.1 release
> so if you have an older pre 3.1 release snapshot or CVS snapshot, be sure to 
> grab the actual 3.1 release

I'm using 3.2. Concerning GNATS it seems that PRs are write-only, but I
don't want to claim that :)

I'm also waiting for the day they'll finally include my (small and
unimportant) patch I've sent several weeks ago.


-- 
mail: adi@thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP: v2-key via keyserver

That is afterfullpullable - das ist nachvollziehbar!!

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Robert Dewar]

"Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message news:<PmtF8.29827$sg2.7831839@typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net>...

> Yup..There are problems.. There are also problems in GNAT 
> 3.14, 3.13, 3.12, 3.15 ... etc.

But none of these releases failed ACATS tests and tests in
our test suite. GNAT 5 has significant numbers of failures
in all categories on all targets. Several of these are
of the form of incorrect code being generated silently
and resulting in wrong results. I am not saying that the
build is unusable, not at all, it will probably work fine
for a lot of stuff, but it is still not at the product
releasable level for us. Actually my current view is for
our most up to date internal tree, which is quite a bit
beyond the 3.1 release, so the 3.1 release may well have
additional problems, we have not run the 3.1 release itself
against our test suites at all. I believe Laurent Guerby
is working to make the ACATS suites usable in the FSF
context.

One thing to understand here is that in the past when we
have released a version like 3.15p it has passed all our
internal qualification tests at the point corresponding
to its internal freeze date. That's always been a criterion
for any release (of GNAT Pro or the public version). A
consequence was that the public versions were always quite
a bit behind, but reasonably reliable. 

Our new approach for public releases, integration into the
GCC 3 tree, does not give any such guarantees. The plus is
that it is far closer to our development wavefront, the minus is that
it is likely to be somewhat unstable. Our
feeling is that students can probably stay with 3.14p just
fine, and hobbyists who want to fiddle with the latest and
greatest and don't care whether it's 100% reliable can 
benefit from the GCC 3 version.

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Simon Wright]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

> But none of these releases failed ACATS tests and tests in
> our test suite. GNAT 5 has significant numbers of failures
                  ^^^^^^

Drat, I'd been saying there wasn't a 5.nn and we're going to (FSF) 3.1
etc .. confused by naming conventions ..

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Jeffrey Creem]

"Robert Dewar" <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:5ee5b646.0205181220.66cba6c2@posting.google.com...
> "Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message
news:<PmtF8.29827$sg2.7831839@typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net>...
>
> > Yup..There are problems.. There are also problems in GNAT
> > 3.14, 3.13, 3.12, 3.15 ... etc.
>
> But none of these releases failed ACATS tests and tests in
> our test suite. GNAT 5 has significant numbers of failures
> in all categories on all targets. Several of these are
> of the form of incorrect code being generated silently
> and resulting in wrong results. I am not saying that the


And of course I am not going to argue with Robert about
the quality of any particular GNAT release since that would be somewhat
silly.

But... The fact that past public releases pass all ACATS tests and
3.1 fails some and can produce incorrect code is somewhat bad
however I strongly suspect that at some point in their life
cycles each of those public releases produced incorrect
code on some customers code somewhere.

Passing ACATS does give me a warm fuzzy but regression
testing any new compiler release on my own code base is the
only thing that really convinces me of the quality of any given
compiler for my own use.

Still, I would not suggest that people use 3.1 for some important
project with a real customer but then again I don't think it is really
a great idea to use any of the other versions (of any complicated
product) for that purpose without support either.

Disclaimer : Of course I have never had the opportunity of actually using
an ACT released compiler on any project....  I have however used
plenty of support compilers that have passed various conformance suites and
still been "broken".

P.S. I am sure I said something above that conflicts with my first statement
about not arguing with Robert about GNAT... I am glad I just said it
was a silly idea and not a stupid one :)

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Robert Dewar]

"Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message news:<a9BF8.31646$sg2.8197256@typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net>...
> P.S. I am sure I said something above that conflicts with 
> my first statement about not arguing with Robert about 
> GNAT

In fact everything you said makes perfect sense. No one
is saying the GNAT in 3.1 will fail on all programs, just that it does
not meet our QA criteria yet and we know of
too many programs on which it does fail.

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Jerry van Dijk]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

> But none of these releases failed ACATS tests and tests in
> our test suite. GNAT 5 has significant numbers of failures
> in all categories on all targets.

<snip>

> Our new approach for public releases, integration into the
> GCC 3 tree, does not give any such guarantees. The plus is
> that it is far closer to our development wavefront, the minus is that
> it is likely to be somewhat unstable.

Just for clarification: DOes the GCC 3.1 release mean there will be no more
public releases from ACT ?

-> if so, that means I will have to set up the GCC 3.1 build tree and ACATS
   and start hunting bugs which may already have been solved by ACT, instead 
   of using my time more productively.

Also, some time ago the NT release was split in a Standard GNAT release and
a Windows support package. Does the new policy mean that there will be no
more Windows support package releases from ACT ?

-> the latter means we as users will have to set up a separate project to
   maintain and develop this further, as otherwise GNAT becomes unusable for
   us.

Finally, the Mingw32 (which includes GNAT) packaging is not very helpful for 
beginners, esp. not Ada beginners. It seems that with a lack of further public 
windows releases from ACT, another project is needed to prepare a beginner 
usable install package.

All in all, if there are no more public releases for NT from ACT, we windows
users need to organize ourself, to make sure that GNAT remains an alternative
to ObjectAda on Windows. GNAT 3.14p is nice, but already obsolete both in
GNAT version and being based on GCC 2.8.1.

-- 
--  Jerry van Dijk   | email: jvandyk@attglobal.net
--  Leiden, Holland  | web:   users.ncrvnet.nl/gmvdijk

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Ted Dennison]

Jerry van Dijk <jvandyk@attglobal.net> wrote in message news:<wk4rh4332y.fsf@attglobal.net>...
> dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:
> 
> > Our new approach for public releases, integration into the
> > GCC 3 tree, does not give any such guarantees. The plus is
> > that it is far closer to our development wavefront, the minus is that
> > it is likely to be somewhat unstable.
> 
> Just for clarification: DOes the GCC 3.1 release mean there will be no more
> public releases from ACT ?

I'd like to hear that too.

> -> if so, that means I will have to set up the GCC 3.1 build tree and ACATS
>    and start hunting bugs which may already have been solved by ACT, instead 
>    of using my time more productively.

I don't think that should be that much of an issue. They will want to
integrate fixes into the gcc baseline fairly quickly, because if you
hold back baseline changes, it becomes a huge chore to put them all in
later and keep things working. This is expecially true if other gcc
users are making changes directly to the baseline.

> All in all, if there are no more public releases for NT from ACT, we windows
> users need to organize ourself, to make sure that GNAT remains an alternative

I agree. I've been looking into this a bit. Somehow I doubt I'll have
the free time to do it all myself though. But I can certianly share
what little I've found out. We at least need some kind of "howto" for
Win32 builds.

-- 
T.E.D.
Home     -  mailto:dennison@telepath.com (Yahoo: Ted_Dennison)
Homepage -  http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[John R. Strohm]

Stupid question.

I don't currently have access to a Linux box.  I do have a Windows box.

What file(s) do I need to download from where to get the Windows version of
Gnat/GCC?  Is there a procedure somewhere?

"chris.danx" <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:IbOE8.2475$UR2.260071@news11-gui.server.ntli.net...
>
> "Steve Sangwine" <sjs@essex.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:3ce3a7de.6340210@news.essex.ac.uk...
> > The GCC website reports release of GCC 3.1 on 15 May (yesterday). As
> > has been noted in comp.lang.ada before, 3.1 includes the Ada
> > 'front-end' as they call it, known to us as Gnat.
>
> What is the status of GNAT in gcc 3.1?  Will it build on Windows and are
> there any outstanding issues?
>
> Just curious,
> Chris
>
>

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Ted Dennison]

"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message news:<042C69DEA01C5AFD.8E8C21B503ACB9D1.91C0731258790EF7@lp.airnews.net>...
> What file(s) do I need to download from where to get the Windows version of
> Gnat/GCC?  

The GCC sources are available directly from the CVS server at
http://gcc.gnu.org , or you can ftp them from the mirror at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-3.1/ . I think you can take the whole
thing, or get just the "core" and "ada" tarballs.

Go to the Mingw download page (
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435 ) to get a
small Unix-like system to use for building. If you can get it to build
with cygwin, you're a better man than I (you may be anyway :-)  ). You
will probably just want to start with the latest stable WingW
distribution, which right now is 1.1. You may end up needing MSys and
Contrib as well (I haven't gotten that far yet).

I have some old directions from a kind soul I asked for help a long
time ago, wherein he warned about path confusion between cygwin and
gnat on one hand, and mingw on the other, causing no end of trouble. I
can vouch that this is a problem. I'm still stuck on it myself.
(Perhaps I should just uninstall gnat and cygwin for now).


> Is there a procedure somewhere?

There *needs* to be.


-- 
T.E.D.
Home     -  mailto:dennison@telepath.com (Yahoo: Ted_Dennison)
Homepage -  http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Jeffrey Creem]

> > What file(s) do I need to download from where to get the Windows version
of
> > Gnat/GCC?
>

I deleted a lot here but I'll try to answer the question above along with
talking to some of the topics in this thread.

First of all.. No matter what else you do, you should get the GNAT 3.14
binary from
ftp://ftp.cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/3.14p/winnt/

Once that is done, you will have a windows version of GNAT/GCC (just not the
latest).

Next, if you want to build the windows version from 3.1 sources...that will
be more fun..
I thought it would be fun to try since I have had some experience building
GNAT from sources under Linux and Solaris (and even a cross compiler or two)

I download the msys packages that come with the mingw distribution (but note
that I do not have the "rest" of the mingw tools installed (i.e. no mingw
gcc other than GNAT 3.14)
and was able to do the configure of the 3.1 sources... and the "touch"
commands called out in the
gcc build instructions.

 Fairly early in build process(but after creating xgcc, g++, etc)    it
failed with


if [ -f stmp-dirs ]; then true; else touch stmp-dirs; fi
./xgcc -B./ -Bf:/local/i686-pc-mingw32/bin/ -isystem
f:/local/i686-pc-mingw32/include -isystem
f:/local/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-include -O2 -I../../gcc-3.1/gcc/../winsup/inclu
de -I../../gcc-3.1/gcc/../winsup/cygwin/include -I../../gcc-3.1/gcc/../winsu
p/w32api/include -DIN_GCC    -W -Wall -Wwrite-strings -Wstrict-prototypes -W
missing-prototypes -isystem
./include   -g  -DIN_LIBGCC2 -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED  -I. -I. -I../../gcc-3
.1/gcc -I../../gcc-3.1/gcc/. -I../../gcc-3.1/gcc/config -I../../gcc-3.1/gcc/
../include -DL_chkstk -xassembler-with-cpp -c
../../gcc-3.1/gcc/config/i386/cygwin.asm -o libgcc/./_chkstk.o
as: unrecognized option `--gstabs'
xgcc.exe: Internal error: Signal 0 (program as)
Please submit a full bug report.
See <URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/bugs.html> for instructions.



I have not submitted a bug report because I expect operator error.. (Most
likely being that I need to build new
binutils tell this new compiler to use the newly build GNU as,ld rather than
the one that comes with GNAT 3.14).


In any case, after the failure I have not gotten a chance to go look at this
again... I am not even 100% that it is possible
to build with only the msys environment.... I suppose I will have to break
down and really read all of the documents on
this.

If someone figures this out we could probably get a build hosted on
adapower.com


But, unless you really really want to build your own compiler for fun, use
3.14p until someone else figures this out.

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Jeffrey Creem]

Ok..Forget all that babbling and just see the "prebuilt version of gcc 3.1
with Ada" thread.

"Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message
news:1zfG8.39426$sg2.9882949@typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net...
>
> A bunch of half truths and some misleading info. :)

Re: GCC 3.1 released

[Ted Dennison]

"Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message news:<R8gG8.39680$sg2.9911633@typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net>...
> Ok..Forget all that babbling and just see the "prebuilt version of gcc 3.1
> with Ada" thread.
> 
> "Jeffrey Creem" <jeff@thecreems.com> wrote in message
> news:1zfG8.39426$sg2.9882949@typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net...
> >
> > A bunch of half truths and some misleading info. :)

Note that will currently give you a "beta" version. Of course, if the
"betaness" is just that they don't entirely trust their building of it
yet, its probably way better than what I would have built myself.