Re: support of older compilers

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 4 Nov 2004, Clayton Weaver stated:
> I found that none of the gcc 3.x versions could
> correctly compile a construct like this
> (independent of runtime glibc version):
> 
> file1.h:
> 
> /* header boilerplate to avoid multiple #includes of
>    the same file */
> 
> #define STR1  "string 1"
> 
> file2.c:
> 
> #include "file1.h"
> 
> const char * str2 = "whatever"STR1"stuff this\n\
> string has in it"STR1" and so on ad infinitum\n\
> "STR1"yada yada"; 
> 
> /* this was actually about 40 lines, maybe more,
>    with maybe 10 instances of "../"STR1"..." */
> 
> All of the gcc-3.x versions would bail with
> an error trying to compile that str2 definition
> in file2.c.

And do I see any bug reports from you in GCC bugzilla?  I do not (not
under the name `Clayton Weaver', anyway).

Further, the code you provide works in all the GCC-3.x versions I've got
here.

If you don't even *report* the bug, how can you expect it to get fixed?

> They didn't always fail on literal string
> concatenation (IIRC some short ones compiled
> ok), but they consistently failed to concatenate
> literal strings correctly for some source
> files that gcc-2.95.3 would compile correctly
> every time.

The preprocessor was totally rewritten between GCC-2.95.x and GCC-3.x: a
number of things that were valid in 2.95.x but invalid under ISO C were
made to not work in 3.x (for example, the compiler warns about attempts
to concatenate two things with ## that aren't preprocessing tokens, and
eventually this was made a hard error, IIRC).

This is, of course, not a bug.

I can find no mention of string concatenation bugs against the new
preprocessor relating to anything other than token pasting (and all of
those bugs are people trying to token-paste things that aren't tokens,
generally strings).

> (The glibc trees had distributor patches, so I filed
> the bug report via their support

What? You found a compiler bug, so you reported it as a bug against
glibc?

> In sum: for production code it doesn't matter
> what all a new C compiler version can do that
> the old one could not if it won't compile
> quite ordinary standard C correctly.

... especially if the people who see the problems don't report them and
don't provide reproducible testcases.

> It would be good to have bugs fixed in the new compilers,

It would be good if people would report bugs in the new compilers. :)

>                                                           because they
> obviously have some advantages (I noticed that gcc-3.4.x seemed quite
> a bit faster than 2.95.3 when compiling glibc,

It is quite a bit slower :(

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