scs@itivax.iti.org (Steve Simmons) (09/20/89)
silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes: >I ftp'd the files for v. 1-3.5 and TeX'd the gcc-info.tex file; >it says under the 'bullet' for mips that DEC/mips is an exception >not yet supported. CAN ANYONE SUPPLY INFO ON AN FTP'able version >for DEC/MIPS/DECSTATION3100 ??????? Others have been asking similar questions about gdb, etc. The following is a summary of the info I received on the topic a few months back. The DEC 2100/3100/5400/5800 series and MIPS use a custom symbol table format from Third Eye Software. It is different from both BSD stabs and AT&T COFF. One writer quoted Mark Linton, the creator of stabs, calling the format ``an exercise in complexity''. GCC/G++ won't run on these until either someone decides the port is worth the effort of rewriting all the symbol table stuff or DEC/MIPS goes to a more standard format. So the short answer is "it doesn't exist and nobody is working on it." Now the long answer. IMHO, DEC and MIPS are unlikely to change to make GNU users happy. So there are two courses of action: One, modify the gnu compiler and debugger to understand the symbol table format. This is likely to meet with some resistance from RMS et al, based on their extremely lukewarm support for the COFF stuff. On the other hand, there are a lot of DECmips and MIPSmips users out there. Since MIPS says they're selling the software suite as well as the risc technology, there will probably be more as time goes by. The other is to adopt a robotussin-like solution and bring over the gnu binutils (gas, nm, ld, etc). This may not be feasible, as it's not at all clear where the MIPS optimisers does their real work. If part of it is in the assembler, there may be problems. -- Steve Simmons scs@vax3.iti.org Industrial Technology Institute Ann Arbor, MI. "Velveeta -- the Spam of Cheeses!" -- Uncle Bonsai