[Aldor-l] Portability

[Stephen Watt]

Pippijn,

These questions certainly are useful.

I agree that we don't want an undue amount of baggage keeping Aldor
running on places that are never used anymore.  The dividing line I
would use in deciding these questions would be:  Is this an issue that
might recurr?

So, for example,  it may be that we will never use again a platform
with a severely broken C compiler so that CC_no_void_pointer and
CC_no_token_paste and CC_no_empty_file are obsolete.

On the other hand, segmented architectures keep coming back in
different guises.  We now have NUMA, and the C standard does not
require that pointers be cannonical, so I would fear that we have to
keep the pointer cannonicalization but restrict its use to low-level
code, e.g. the garbage collector or EQ hashtables.

Yours,

Stephen


2008/8/16  <pip88nl at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I am currently building the autoconf checks and thinking about a few
> portability issues. I don't know how important each of them is anymore.
> Here is a list of #ifdefs which I am unsure about:
>
>  CC_no_void_pointer: Are there any compilers that don't support void*
>    anymore?
>  CC_noncanonical_pointer: Does anybody still use segmented
>    architectures? (8086, anyone?)
>  CC_no_token_paste: Are there any preprocessors that don't support the
>    token paste operator (##)?
>  CC_no_empty_file: Were there ever compilers that *error* on empty
>    files? If yes, are there any left?
>  CC_short_pointer: Does anybody still use MSDOS?
>
> Another question is whether these questions are actually relevant. Should
> I just go for maximum portability and try being compatible with every
> system in the world? I think not. I think it's better to concentrate on
> current platforms. As far as I am aware of, Aldor does not run on FreeBSD
> 6 and OpenSolaris. I have direct access to a NetBSD machine at home and I
> am planning to install OpenSolaris in a virtual machine. Windows is
> already in my virtual machine. I work on debian etch. I have remote
> access to a VMS system (which I don't understand.. I can't handle VMS)
> and a FreeBSD 6.2 system.
>
> Systems:
>  FreeBSD 6.2 (i386/amd64), NetBSD 4.0 (i386/amd64),
>  OpenSolaris 2008 (i386/amd64), Linux 2.6 (i386/amd64),
>  Windows XP 2600 (i386)
>
> Compilers:
>  GCC 3.4 (i386/amd64), GCC 4.1 (i386/amd64), MSVC 9 (i386),
>  ICC (i386/amd64)
>
> In addition to that, I have access to:
>  HP OpenVMS 8.3 (ia64), HP HP-UX 11 (ia64/hppa)
>
>
> That makes up for a few combinations. Theoretically, I could use dosbox
> on Linux and port aldor to that. The question is whether that is desired.
> Of course it is "cool" to be very portable, but it is also very uncool to
> be nonportable to FreeBSD.
>
> What other combinations can people offer for testing and what
> combinations are interesting? I want to make a list of systems that work
> and systems that we want to have working.
>
> Pippijn
>
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