muffy@violet.berkeley.edu (03/17/89)
I am thinking of buying a 32-bit C-compiler to take full advantage of the speed of the 80386 chip. I know of 2 compilers, the HIGH-C (Metaware), and NDP-C (Microway). Does anyone have any experience with either of these compilers, or any other 32-bit C-compilers for the 386? Thanks in advance Kathy Murphy muffy@violet.berkeley.edu
mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (03/17/89)
>I am thinking of buying a 32-bit C-compiler to take >full advantage of the speed of the 80386 chip. I >know of 2 compilers, the HIGH-C (Metaware), and NDP-C >(Microway). Does anyone have any experience with either >of these compilers, or any other 32-bit C-compilers >for the 386? I have experience with the MicroWay NDPC compiler. It is basically a good-to-excellent code generator, but "not ready for prime time". That is, it benchmarks quite well, for most programs somewhat faster than Microsoft C5.1, notwithstanding that it makes "ints" 32 bits, even for very int oriented tests. Its floating point optimizer is not quite as good at common subexpression elimination and register allocation, but in other ways is better, so it sometimes beats MSC. There are two ways it is "not ready for prime time". First, the manual - the manual is a horrible mishmash describing some subroutines as C others as Fortran (!!!!). The information is there, but I find it odd to have to read Fortran in a C manual! Second, it is neither fish nor fowl. Neither Ansi C, nor a BSD C clone nor a Sys V C clone. There are missing include files, missing functionality that has to be done with bios calls, etc. The good news is that they are promising to release a new version "any day now" that will remedy the latter problem. The final good news is that it really works well. It is truly amazing how well it works. Very few if ANY bugs. Somehow they really make MS-DOS work as a 32 bit OS. Actually, it works better than as a 16 bit system! I have NEVER crashed the computer when running a finished 32 bit program (and, with buggy ones, get very few crashes). A bug that would crash the computer under Microsoft C just generates a run time error message, and the command prompt reappears. It appears that the protected mode really is doing protection. Be warned that there is a severe problem that is not of MicroWay's doing: Phar Lap's runtime system licsence problem: IF you intend to distribute a program compiled with NDPC either 1: Your users are going to have to fork over $500 to Phar Lap for a runtime system. OR 2: You are going to have to fork over $1500 (!!!!!) (to Phar Lap) to distribute programs written using NDPC. There would be no limit to how many you could distribute. This seriously limits their audience. No other compiler manufacturer I am aware of has this problem (except maybe Metaware!). Doug McDonald (mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu)