[ On Wednesday, March 24, 1999 at 13:39:00 (-0500), Christos Zoulas wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: code compatibility between sunos and netbsd on sun3
>
> On Mar 24,  1:21pm, rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu (rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu) wrote:
> -- Subject: Re: code compatibility between sunos and netbsd on sun3
> 
> | What about obscure things like optimization switches?  Normally I shy 
> | away from optimizing, unless really necessary, since optimizers tend
> | to break.  Are the sunos cc optimizers good enough, or should I turn
> | that off, completely.
> 
> They used to be pretty good as far as I remember.

I don't remember ever having to turn off optimization on my sun3s with
SunOS-4.1.1_u1.  It was usually a good win too, especially for size,
though usually for speed too.  I always avoided GCC on my sun3s because
it was too big and slow itself, but I understand that GCC's m68k
optimization is top-notch and may well have been better than cc's.

As for code portability, I ran quite a few big and complex SunOS sun3
binaries (all compiled with SunOS cc so far as I could tell) under
NetBSD-1.2 on sun3, and they all seemed to run fine.  One of these days
I hope to re-activate a couple of my sun3s to see how they fair with
more recent incarnations of NetBSD, but by then I doubt I'll have any
need to run SunOS binaries, never mind a ready source of them.

On the sparc under SunOS-4.1.4 I found GCC, up to an including 2.7.2,
rather *less* favourable than SunOS cc, both for reliability and correct
code, as well as for decent speed and memory utilization.  However these
days I use NetBSD 1.3.x exclusively on my sparcs and I don't have any
major complaints with its gcc.  I had a plan once to try running the
SunOS cc binaries under NetBSD and do some benchmark comparison, but
I've never found the time to do that....

These days I run the SunOS-4 netscape binaries for sparc under
NetBSD-1.3.x/sparc with no major problems (some versions crash with some
operations, but I think those were netscape bugs, not emulation bugs).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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