ravi@duke.cs.duke.edu (Ravi Subrahmanyan) (05/07/87)
>the installation procedures are ok for a hard disk or dual >floppy system, but are an incredible, frustrating pain on a single floppy >(e.g. 1040stf) system. multiple swaps *per file* are performed, and we're >talking *lots* of files. there is a lot of room for user confusion. i >suspect that appropriate use of a ram disk at install time could make this >much more reasonable, but this is not supported by their installer. It's true that MWC's installer does not cater very well to single-floppy users, but it's not that bad. All it does is read a file (used to be called install.dat in 1.1, I forget if the name's been changed) and copy files accordingly: it is straightforward to set up a ramdisk (any ramdisk) and copy files from GEM according to the installation file (which can be printed out). Just ignore the installer! >of brings up another issue, the appropriateness of this compiler for "small" >systems, e.g. 520 with ss drives, either 520 or 1040 without a hard disk. >single sided drives are supported, but i don't think i'd want to try it. and >though work on a single floppy is supposedly possible, i haven't succeeded >at the install yet, and even when i do succeed a lot of the convenience of >having the msh commands and everything available at once will be impaired on >a single disk system. Hmm, I disagree. I've used MWC very well on a one single-sided floppy 520 with 1 meg, and an appropriate ramdisk. You have to use different floppies for the 1) shell& utilities, 2) compilation, and 3) linking, and you can't use Make, but that's about it. I've managed to compile TVX (25K lines), Less, and all kinds of other stuff. The main thing is to use a ramdisk for the sources. For example, you could put some copy commands in the profile to create the /tmp, /bin etc. files on the ramdisk and copy some of the utilities over. 1 Meg of memory is important though (so you can have a nice big ramdisk) I fully agree with the rest of Tom's article, its a great compiler/system. Don't let the eccentricities of the installer, or the hardware (or the lack thereof) get in the way of your enjoyment. -ravi ps: no affiliations with MWC etc.
rgoodman@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Ron Carl Goodman) (05/07/87)
I use MWC with 1meg & 1 ds disk. I store the compiler, linker, include
libraries on a 512K ram disk. My program is on drive a and all the utilities
I wanted are on drive a in a:\bin. This includes make, another editor,
and 26 other utilities (some MW and some PD stuff). I never have to
swap disks during compiles or to use utilities. msh has new history
features that are good (vis. !!, !-2, !m). As far as I can tell, there
really isn't a better set up since having the compiler/linker/libraries
on RamDisk is FAST and having my source code on disk is SAFE.
BTW, I switched recently from Lattice C!
My whole program used to compile in 80 minutes and I had no make system.
Now, it compiles in 11 minutes and a make system as well.
(no clock, I just load/save the date when I enter/exit msh)
My program used to be >100K and is now about 60K.
Things seem to be running noticably faster.
One strangeness about MWC that noone seems to have mentioned before is
the way it handles short ints and long ints when passed as parameters
to functions. For example, printf("%d %d\n",65537l); will display
1 1
To print long ints you use printf("%D\n",65537l);
This means you better not pass a long int to a function expecting a
short int or vice versa! I realize its a good idea anyway, but it
is unusual. K&R C makes chars, short ints and long ints pass as 4 bytes
and I haven't seen it even mentioned in the docs, except in the printf
routine. The docs seem very good, maybe I just missed it.
Ron Goodman
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