[kde-solaris] compiling kdepim

Stefan Teleman steleman at nyc.rr.com
Sat Aug 28 03:14:33 CEST 2004


The KDE Developers don't really use the blatantly non-portable GCC 
extensions in their code (i.e. __attribute__((packed)) ... and so on) 
-- these would just be simply unrecognizable syntax. GCC 2.9*'s 
interpretation of the language was very liberal and very far away 
from the standard specification. The 3.* series became increasingly 
closer to the language specification. I think the IRIX and Tru64 
compilers were closer to the GCC approach -- they were making 
developer's life easier by allowing more liberal (and more intuitive) 
syntax (i used the IRIX compilers in the past, the Tru64 compiler 
only played with it superficially).

The Sun compilers are _very_ strict in their implementation of the 
language standard, especially for C++, but they track the language 
standards very closely. For example, in kdenetwork, most of the 
problems were caused by namespace scope resolution (Koenig lookup) 
problems.

IIRC, Dr. Steven A. Clamage, who happens to be the Chairman of the 
ANSI/ISO C++ Standard Committee,  works at Sun. Something tells me 
that he knows a thing or two about C++. :-) So, i would defer to him 
in terms of language standard interpretation.

It's an extremely interesting experience to work on this. But, it can 
be time consuming, and, at times, very frustrating. :-)

--Stefan

-----

On Friday 27 August 2004 15:03, Albert Chin wrote:
> Is the result of patching so many files because Sun poorly
> implements the C++ standard or because the KDE Developers use G++
> extensions? We've built KDE with the Tru64 UNIX C++ compiler and
> the IRIX C++ compiler with only a few problems.

-- 
Stefan Teleman          'Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition'
steleman at nyc.rr.com                          -Monty Python



More information about the kde-solaris mailing list