Time to give up and move on?

Walter - is there any chance of a roadmap of any sort, even without dates?

On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:44:37 +0200, James Mansion <james@mansionfamily.plus.com> wrote:

> Time to give up and move on?
>
> Walter - is there any chance of a roadmap of any sort, even
> without dates?

Good point. I was wondering to if DMC is a dakota horse... Robert.

James Mansion wrote:
> Time to give up and move on?
> 
> Walter - is there any chance of a roadmap of any sort, even
> without dates?

I generally do things that follow the interests of the people that use it.

On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:21:58 +0200, Walter Bright <newshound1@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> I generally do things that follow the interests of the people that use it.

That makes sense but I still think DMC is to valuable to leave it behind.

I posted some questions in c++.windows-32-bit but no responses... without a good community DMC users are lost. :-(

-- 
Robert M. Münch
Management & IT Freelancer
http://www.robertmuench.de

So:

Is Boost fully working now?

What about other 'reference' toolsets like Poco, wxWidgets, ACE, Qt?

I had thought that there was some planned activity over linker etc to make that a maintainable part of the chain and make way for 64 bit?

There has certainly been some activity here (and in other fora) relating to issues since the .51 reelase in January.

I don't quite know what to read into your reply!

James Mansion wrote:
> So:
> 
> Is Boost fully working now?

No, mainly because nobody has expended the effort to do so.

> 
> What about other 'reference' toolsets like Poco, wxWidgets, ACE,
> Qt?

wxWidgets is

> 
> I had thought that there was some planned activity over linker etc
> to make that a maintainable part of the chain and make way for 64
> bit?

Going to have to do 64 bit sooner or later!

> 
> There has certainly been some activity here (and in other fora)
> relating to issues since the .51 reelase in January.
> 
> I don't quite know what to read into your reply!

== Quote from Walter Bright (newshound1@digitalmars.com)'s article
> James Mansion wrote:
> > So:
> >
> > Is Boost fully working now?
> No, mainly because nobody has expended the effort to do so.

Doesn't that someone have to be you though?

We're somewhat dependent on you to do all teh fixes, and pretty much all the triage, and without any activity here its impossible to determine what's going on.  If, indeed, anything at all is going on.

> Going to have to do 64 bit sooner or later!

Indeed.  Could hook up with LLVM maybe?

That project could benefit from greatly a non-gcc front end.  Do you still have a material interest in using a proprietary back-end?

(Or indeed keeping the front end proprietary?  I have no idea how you make your daily bread these days Walter - long time since we met with John H and Dave Mansell in Woolwich!  But the BSD camp is a compiler short of a toolset at the moment.)

James

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:09:04 +0200, James Mansion <james@mansionfamily.plus.com> wrote:

> I had thought that there was some planned activity over linker etc

I'm mostly struggleing with DMC in that I have to compile all and everything to avoid linker problems. Not all libs can be converted to OMF format. So, the chain is:

- Alter build environment to use DMC

- Change source code to compile with DMC. Biggest problems is, that DMC doesn't look like MSVC to the pre-processor etc.

Walter, can't you just add some compiler options where I can specify which MSVC version DMC should fake?

Somethinglike -msvc=6|7|8

- Collect all necessary LIB files, try to convert them etc.

All this is quite hard work even for just replacing MSVC with DMC. If you compile open-source stuff from Unix it's even more work.

I recently setup MingW with MSYS and all kind of stuff (not an easy task as well) but now I can just compile linux projects with autoconf / configure etc. Much less hassel...

As much as I love DMC, as soon as you have to combine several projects for your app, it's not an easy task.

-- 
Robert M. Münch
Management & IT Freelancer
http://www.robertmuench.de

James Mansion wrote:
> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound1@digitalmars.com)'s article
>> James Mansion wrote:
>>> So:
>>>
>>> Is Boost fully working now?
>> No, mainly because nobody has expended the effort to do so.
> 
> Doesn't that someone have to be you though?

Not necessarily. Most Boost developers spent a very large amount of time getting their libraries to work around the various compiler vagaries - time the vendor didn't invest. Trying to figure out why a Boost library fails usually requires a thorough understanding of that library - this is a big job for someone other than the library writer.

Once the problem is reduced to a small test case (nearly all reduce to 10 lines or so), it can be posted to the DMC++ bugzilla.

> 
> We're somewhat dependent on you to do all teh fixes, and pretty
> much all the triage, and without any activity here its impossible
> to determine what's going on.  If, indeed, anything at all is
> going on.
> 
>> Going to have to do 64 bit sooner or later!
> 
> Indeed.  Could hook up with LLVM maybe?

I don't know what the state of LLVM is, or how ready it is, but it still would be a major project to hook up with.

> 
> That project could benefit from greatly a non-gcc front end.  Do
> you still have a material interest in using a proprietary back-end?
> 
> (Or indeed keeping the front end proprietary?  I have no idea how
> you make your daily bread these days Walter - long time since we
> met with John H and Dave Mansell in Woolwich!  But the BSD camp is
> a compiler short of a toolset at the moment.)
> 
> James

Robert M. Münch wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:09:04 +0200, James Mansion <james@mansionfamily.plus.com> wrote:
> 
>> I had thought that there was some planned activity over linker etc
> 
> I'm mostly struggleing with DMC in that I have to compile all and everything to avoid linker problems. Not all libs can be converted to OMF format. So, the chain is:
> 
> - Alter build environment to use DMC
> 
> - Change source code to compile with DMC. Biggest problems is, that DMC doesn't look like MSVC to the pre-processor etc.
> 
> Walter, can't you just add some compiler options where I can specify which MSVC version DMC should fake?

DMC's preprocessor is 100% standard compliant. I just cannot work up the desire to emulate various VC bugs in it. For portable libraries, this shouldn't be a problem, because they shouldn't be relying on VC compiler bugs.

> 
> Somethinglike -msvc=6|7|8
> 
> - Collect all necessary LIB files, try to convert them etc.
> 
> All this is quite hard work even for just replacing MSVC with DMC. If you compile open-source stuff from Unix it's even more work.
> 
> I recently setup MingW with MSYS and all kind of stuff (not an easy task as well) but now I can just compile linux projects with autoconf / configure etc. Much less hassel...
> 
> As much as I love DMC, as soon as you have to combine several projects for your app, it's not an easy task.

I understand. I've tried in the past to make DMC match other compilers' buggy behavior, but it's a losing game for me as the bugs constantly shift. What has worked better is making it standard compliant.