The collected works of irixpgmr

I am Gus's cohort in crime. I did get the source but I can't reveal how. It was under a strict promise to keep it a secret. However, I can tell you about the problems I had with it.

BTW, this is based off of source code I got in December 2004. This may be old news.

The main problem with compiling boinc on a non-linux/mac/sparc machine is that it is using c++ constructs that ANSI has deprecated. ANSI has dictated that 'using namespace std;' is not to be used any more. ANSI now wants you to only include the name spaces that you are using. For example, 'using namespace std::cout;'.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem but boinc has lots of source files and in the source files, they always have a line for using namespace in the deprecated way. This compiles fine with g++ because gnu compiler group decided to let people continue to use the old way. However, compilers based off of strict ANSI guidelines, have major problems. This is a huge problem when porting. Basically, you have to go through every file and figure out which namespace it is using and have only those namespaces included on the line. It is a big pain.

Don't get me wrong. I like einstein@home. I run it on all my machines except my SGI boxes. It just not viable to port at this time.

A while a go, I tried to get the client code ported to irix. What I found out was that the code was not strict ansi c++ compliant (which MIPSPro requires). The biggest problem is the use of the statement:

using namespace std;

When you use this in multiple source files, you can run into name space collisions. Due to the namespace collision problems, ANSI made the change that you only use the namespaces required. What should be done is including only the namespace you are using for that source file. For example, if you are using cout and endl, you should use the following statements:

using std::cout;
using std::endl;

GCC decided to not enforce it by default. Since most programmers are used to 'using namespace std;' method, it still gets used.

Changing each source file to use only the namespaces that are used clears up quite a few problema, but not all. Life got in the way and I never got the port finished.