C Compilers

[CH...@unk.unk.edu]

Does anyone have recommendations on GCC or DICE?

[jor...@uz.kuleuven.ac.be]

>Does anyone have recommendations on GCC or DICE?

GCC is very good (generates magnificent code and is very useful to port
Unix programs) but you need a lot of memory and harddisk space (4 megabyte
memory is about the minimum I think). GCC is actually three compilers in
one: normal Ansi C with many many GNU extensions, a extensive C++ compiler
and an Objective C compiler.

If you're only concerned about portability to other GCC compilers on other
platforms you can use some of the nice extra C features. Here are some
examples:

- A 'long long' type for 64 bit integers.
- You can use constructions like (a > b ? c : d) = 3; which assigns 3 to
'c' if a > b or 3 to 'd' otherwise.
- A new 'typeof' command to get the type of an identifier. For example:
int a;
typeof (a) b;
This can be very useful in macros (if you want to write a general and safe MAX
macro for example)
- You can also use {} in expressions, allowing things like:
a={int b,i; for (b=i=0;i<4;i++) b += i; b}+4;
- And a lot more I don't remember

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Jorrit Tyberghein : author of PowerVisor
jor...@uz.kuleuven.ac.be
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