vg@csri.toronto.edu (Victor Greenberg) (08/13/88)
>>Has anybody bought Aztec's source debugger, and what do they have to say about it? > >So here's the good news and the bad news: sdb runs well on limited memory >machines, WHEN IT RUNS. > >Unfortunately, sdb is amazingly buggy. In my first hour with it, I must >have crashed my machine at least 10 times! I have even generated >files which crash sdb when it just tries to open it! (This took >all of another hour before I hit it.) Our copy of Aztec C (the latest version, 3.6 I think) arrived a few days ago. I spent a day trying to use it, then gave up and went back to MPW C (which, although incredibly slow at compilation, is a solid package which works). The first thing I did after opening the shrink wrap was to copy by hand all of the files onto my hard disk, into a directory called Aztec. The package did not work very well. Make didn't work (it would do a lot of disk accesses, but not execute any commands) and the C compiler would dump garbage into its output if you tried to redirect its error messages. Finally, I deleted the aztec environment from my disk, and reinstalled it from scratch, using the provided installation program. This fixed up the problems described above, leaving me with these: - If I invoke the C compiler from the MPW shell and use -i to specify an include directory, #include doesn't search the specified directory. (But cc works fine if you invoke it from the Aztec shell) - You can't redirect the output of make when it is invoked from the Aztec shell; eg: make all >error.log The redirection is ignored, and all of the error messages are sent to the console, and scroll off the top of the screen before you can read them. - If my screen saver (Moire) kicks in, then the Aztec shell cannot redraw the screen, and often crashes the system. I finally decided that, if I had this much trouble just trying to compile a program, then the compiler itself is probably not to be trusted either. Has anyone else had these problems, or discovered a solution?
dxjsb@dcatla.UUCP (Jack S. Brindle) (08/15/88)
In article <8808131413.AA16229@gerrard.csri.toronto.edu> vg@csri.toronto.edu (Victor Greenberg) writes: >Our copy of Aztec C (the latest version, 3.6 I think) arrived a few days >ago. I spent a day trying to use it, then gave up and went back to MPW C >(which, although incredibly slow at compilation, is a solid package which >works). > > - You can't redirect the output of make when it is invoked from the > Aztec shell; eg: make all >error.log > The redirection is ignored, and all of the error messages are sent to > the console, and scroll off the top of the screen before you can read > them. Now just what were you trying to do? The output of make normally does NOT go to the screen. The ERROR output does. Try redirecting the error output to a file; you will find it does what you want it to do. You'll find info about how to do it in the SHELL chapter of the manual. It really does help to read the manual :-). A lot of problems could be avoided if people did! > - If my screen saver (Moire) kicks in, then the Aztec shell cannot > redraw the screen, and often crashes the system. That is because the screen data is not buffered. They really should rewrite the screen package. On the other hand, this sounds like a good task to learn the package. >I finally decided that, if I had this much trouble just trying to >compile a program, then the compiler itself is probably not to be >trusted either. Has anyone else had these problems, or discovered >a solution? Interesting. I have found the compiler to be amazingly good. Except for the problem with pointers to pascal functions being always allocated in global memory, it seems to be fine! It also allows me to directly look at the output of the compiler so that I can optimize the C code when I write it (Since there are several ways to code something, I prefer to find the fastest and most efficient. This is a pain to find in LSC or MPW). I really don't believe a day is enough time to test out any software. Try again. We use both MPW & Aztec. They both are good packages and have their places. I really doubt that you liked MPW the first time you tried it. Especially if you were used to programming on a UNIX machine. After all, its make is not even close to the "real" make. Good luck, Jack Brindle