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From: Martin Liddle
Subject: help with gpc evaluation
Date: 19 May 2000, 10:17:25

In article <F134B35F65F0CF11B9DB00805FD689570139DC7A@GBHDM001>,
Thompson, Robin S <robin.thompson@eds.com> writes
>I'm currently evaluating gpc as a replacement for a commercial (and no
>longer supported) Pascal compiler on IBM RS/6000 systems running AIX Unix
>4.2.1. The project we're intending to use it on contains nearly 250,000
>lines of Pascal code, and needs to interface to libraries written in C. 
>
>To help with my evaluation, I'd be grateful if anyone else on the list who
>has used gpc with a major project could let me know if it was successful,
>and also what, if any, problems were experienced. I'm also seeking general
>opinions on whether, given the current alpha status of gpc, it's stable
>enough to be used on such a large project?
>
We (my colleague David James did the work) have recently converted a
large suite of programs from EPC Pascal-E to GPC.  The software makes
calls to various C libraries and this has not been a problem.  The
problems I have been aware of include severe problems with modules which
forced us to translate them all to units; various problems with strings
(particularly the failure to initialise the capacity in some
circumstances); repeated problems with packed arrays within records
(easily solved by not packing them) and occasional problems with sets.
We have also been embarrassed on a number of occasions to find bugs in
our code that were due to uninitialised variables that Pascal-E had
automatically initialised whereas GPC doesn't.  This is not a criticism
of GPC but just an illustration of the difficulties of porting between
compilers.  (Hopefully David will pop up in due course to add any
problems I have forgotten).  However we have overcome all these and the
software is now in use.

I'd say that the stability of GPC for large projects is marginal but
steadily improving thanks to the efforts of the development team.
Remember that this is open source software so you always have the option
of fixing any compiler problems that are affecting you badly enough (and
contributing the fixes back to help the rest of us).

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