[erlang-bugs] Building R13B01 on IRIX problems

[Mikael Pettersson]

Patrick Baggett writes:
 > I'm having a problem building Erlang/OTP R13B01 on IRIX using MIPSpro C
 > compiler v7.4.4. Previously, some of the R12 releases build with a bit of
 > convincing, but now it doesn't seem to want to work. I am having two issues:

Did you report those issues? I don't recall ever seeing any reports about IRIX.

 > 2) Problem that is new for R13B+, possibly earlier. I get linker errors to
 > the "functions" __builtin_return_address() and __builtin_expect(). These are
 > GCC-specific extensions to the C language which are not available to
 > MIPSpro. Usually this is solved by #define'ing a macro for them. The modules
 > with linking errors are sys_float.c and ethread.c. The configure script
 > detects whether or not GCC is being used -- shouldn't the system be able to
 > handle when GCC isn't used?

Correct, using GCC should be optional.

Prior to the linkage error there ought to be some compile-time warnings
about calling undeclared functions (those __builtin_*()s).
Can you see if these warnings are present and if so where they occur and
if the compiler identifies their origin? (typically .h files)

As far as handling !GCC, that's normally done by #ifdef tests on __GNUC__
not by heavy-weight autoconf machinery.

What options did you pass to ./configure before attempting the build?

Out of curiosity, why aren't you using GCC? Does MIPSpro generate better
code than gcc-4.x? (gcc-3.x and older are completely obsolete). Also,
you should know that not using GCC disables an important optimisation
in the core Erlang VM interpreter.

/Mikael