rpa@rayssd.UUCP (01/15/87)
A colleague has recently bought a 1040 ST. He also got the developers kit and a hard disk. He is having grave problems with the system re compile times and says that compiling the old standard "hello world" problem takes 20 secs and a further minute to link. Now to me this seems atrocious for such a configuration. Whats worse the runtime library he has apparantly has features like the scanf doesnt work amongst others and when he contacted atari they said something like 'Its not our fault, its one of those well known undocumented broken bits in the library'. My question is is this real and if so is there a better compiler/linker/library than the one in the developers kit (He thinks it is Alcyon) or is there probably something wrong with his configuration that is obvious to all you atari freaks out there? By the way he is definitely not impressed with the documentation with the developers kit either, and he has installed a ramdisk and says he only gets about a 20% improvement on these times. Mail me please with any thoughts, and thanx in advance. Disclaimer: I use 680x0 workstations all the time so I probably expect too much from micros.
ericr@hpvcla.HP.COM (Eric Ross) (01/17/87)
I have had the developers kit for about a year now and have been much less than satisfied with the compiler. The documentation is OK once you have many examples to refer to. My configuration is with the Supra 20 Meg hard disk and I have been quite impressed with the Mark Williams C compiler. It appears to compile just about any ANSI standard C and puts out plenty of warnings(optionally turned off)of where you are stretching the semantics of the language and may introduce portability problems. (assignment of a pointer to an integer; unused variables, etc.). My profession is software development on HP-UX (Unix System V) which takes advantage of C. I have appreciated the fact that I can take a well written program on Unix and copy it to the ST and compile it with minimal problems. I have also looked at Megamax C. It also, appears to be an excellent implementation. I chose MWC because Megamax has some minor limitations(32K limits on arrays) that could bother me. The casual programmer will probably appreciate Megamax more because of its friendly interface, while the serious developer will want MWC. As far as the DRI compiler -- I was sick and tired of running into one bug after another. If I were to do it again, I would probably buy MWC and the Abacus books and not buy the developers kit. Eric Ross ihnp4!hpfcla!hpvcla!ericr