x194@cs.utexas.edu (Jonathan Abbey) (12/06/90)
Greetings. I am looking into the existence of C++ implementations for the Alliant FX/8 series. I suspect what this would boil down to would be gcc+ or AT&T cfront. I am made to understand that gcc doesn't exist for the Alliant (concurrent vectorized 68020's with multiple plain 68020's) yet, and that to make it available would require doing some deep delving to bring it up. Is this the true situtation? Given that it is, I'd appreciate any ftp sites harboring information on AT&T's cfront, or other promising alternatives. Note that I am not conversant with c++ at all at this point - we are looking at a few XWindow packages, and many seem to require c++ (the one in particular that sparked our interest cited cfront 1.2), and we'd like to be able to move in that direction. Thank you for any assistance you may provide.
turner@sp64.csrd.uiuc.edu (Steve Turner) (12/07/90)
I've brought up both g++ and cfront on our Alliant FX/80. Sadly,
we're running a local variant of Concentrix v3+ on it, so the problems
I ran into aren't likely to be solved soon.
As far as I know, the executables produced by g++ run on either CE's
(OK, really ACE's) or IP's, so by implication they don't use the
special CE hardware. cfront uses the Alliant's own C compiler, so
obviously you could try to get it to produce the CE instructions. To
my knowledge no one here has.
The main problems I had in porting cfront to the FX/8 was with our
(slightly buggy) version of the OS. So though I can't say how easy
it will be for you, I think it shouldn't take much - other than a
license from AT&T, of course. It's *not* PD, by any means.
As for g++, I have a set of patches on 1.37.1 which someone in the
Netherlands developed, and have been spread around. Since this
question seems to come up regularly I thought I'd just say: send me
mail and we'll work out how to get them to you.
--
Steve Turner (on the Si prairie - UIUC CSRD)
ARPANET: turner@csrd.uiuc.edu
Phone: (217) 244-7293 or (217) 367-0882
I went walking in the wasted city / Started thinking about entropy
Smelled the wind from the ruined river / Went home to watch TV
-- Warren Zevon