On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 05:27:10PM +0200, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
Okay --- first, most of my antecdote comes from my frustration with
one app in particular. I'd love to use it and offer debugging help to
the authors... but I can never manage to get the bloody thing to
compile.
And, yes, I, too, understand that one codes Open Source for the sheer
pleasure of it.
I am, however, trying to get you to realize something, Lars...
> Yes this is true...but I really do not believe this to be the case.
> Close to conformant compilers exists for all major opertating systems,
> and AFAIK there are much work going on to make support even better.
But it's not there *yet*. Yes, it will be, but it's not. At work we
support 3 unix platforms, none of which have a fully-compliant
ANSI-C++ compiler. I often chat about this with the guy in charge of
platform-level aspects of our software. The picture ain't as rosy as
you paint it.
> Tell an OS vendor that "your C++ compiler is bad/old/antiquated"
> enough times and I bet that the vendor will provide a new one fairly
> soon.
Nope. They'll tell you that they're working on it, that you need to
be patient.
We've actually found bugs in the C++ compilers at work. Again, Lars,
the picture is not nearly as rosy as you paint it.
As far as gcc/egcs is concerned, I agree that they are approaching
full ANSI compliance very quickly. When they reach it, I will
certainly upgrade the compilers on my Linux box. In other
environments, however, upgrading the local version of gcc may not be
that high priority. This is where the problem hits.
Back when I was the only devvie making Solaris 2.5 binaries for LyX, I
was compiling on the machines I used for my graduate research. I
doubt many of us have Solaris/SGI/HPUX/AIX machines sitting in our
basements. How many of the LyX Team who build non-Linux binaries also
have root access on the machine they're using to compile LyX? If the
answer is, "Not Many," then there are a lot of people who'll need to
build & install the latest-and-greatest-gcc locally just so that they
can compile LyX.
Unfortunately, I can't be one of them, and I'd hate to lose the use of
LyX at work...
In any case, the almost all of the compilers will be ANSI in another
two years (so I'm told). So, in the meantime, we'll need to add
workarounds for not-so-widely supported C++ features. They'll go away
by 1.4 anyhow.
--
John Weiss
