OpenEuphoria

Re: lcc-win32

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Jan 15, 2003
• 457 views

Jacob writes:
> 1) I have never received a bug report from your part. At least I do not
> remember.

I e-mailed you but it bounced, so I submitted two bug reports
into the "Q" automatic tracking system. They are bugs #19284 and #19285.
These are not the only bugs I found, but they are really simple to
demonstrate with just a few lines of C code.

> 2) If you do not like my system, I would recommend you to avoid using
> it. Borland compilers, as you say in your web site, are much better.

Some Euphoria users like your system a lot, 
so I will continue to support it.
I think it's fine for small to medium-sized human-written programs,
but for large, machine-generated C code it exhibits more
bugs than Borland or Watcom, so it makes my life more
difficult, since these bugs can take many hours to track down.

Machine-generated C code is different from human-generated.
For example, with the Lcc -O option turned on, I found that
a simple C statement like:

         if (0 != 0) goto X;

was *always* going to label X.
The machine code generated by Lcc was wrong.
A human would not write code like that,
but the translator sometimes does.

In Euphoria version 2.4, I will no longer use the Lcc -O option
by default, but will leave it up to the user to add it in, at his own risk.

> Why make me negative publicity? I do what I can guys,
> probably as hard as you do.

I'm not trying to put down your efforts.
It's quite an achievement to develop and maintain
a C compiler. Borland and Watcom had scores of developers.
But from my point of view I want to encourage people
to use Borland or Watcom if possible. I'll get fewer bug reports,
and people will get faster-executing code with less chance of
frustration. Besides, I don't think there is such a thing as 
"negative publicity". A lot of people have downloaded Lcc because
it was supported by the EtoC Translator. I hope Lcc will continue
to improve. If it starts working better on translated code, I'll be
happy to say so on my Web page.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com