SGI: Development

Hi All! I've just recently acquired an SGI Fuel and at looking over the nekoware packages I'm interested in helping bring a lot of these up to date. My only question is how steadfast is the community about using the MIPSPro compilers? My understanding is that with gcc 4.7.1 the MIPS code generation is pretty tight? I will be porting some software for myself and I'd rather have these changes out in the community, but I have no way of getting the MIPSPro compilers.

Hi Icebalm, and congratulations on acquiring your new red friend!

It is possible to contribute to nekoware with the gcc compiler, although C++ programs made by one compiler cannot be mixed with C++-libraries made by the other, due to name mangling issues. but mixing with C-libraries should be okay. When developing software and building the packages, i recommend to mark the packages as neko_gcc_<package>-<version#>.tardist or neko_<package>_gcc_<version#>.tardist to distinguish them from the MIPSPro compiled packages.

There are quite a few people who contribute a lot to nekoware and otherware. Feel free to browse around, try out some software and get to know your Fuel better. If you encounter problems, post them here so we can try to fix them.

icebalm wrote: My only question is how steadfast is the community about using the MIPSPro compilers? My understanding is that with gcc 4.7.1 the MIPS code generation is pretty tight?

in some cases gcc is the only choice but in any other case, as on pretty much any proprietary system, the native compilers are best. gcc did improve to some extend over the years but recent work on firefox3 as well as a couple of tests i ran a few months ago showed that gcc significantly lacks in multiple ways.
nevertheless nekoware contributions of any kind are welcome of course as long as they're reasonable. for example new does not automatically mean better so updates should be actually justified and not just for the heck of having the latest.
as mentioned by dexter1 already and many others in the past we have the general convention that gcc builds should have "gcc" somewhere in their name.

other than that, fire away and thanks for any submissions in advance