GNU GCC - what version

[karlm]

Howdy

finally got my old gcc setup going again, but was wondering if I needed to update/rebuild new binaries. I'm only really interested currrently on SingleTOS, not MiNT, and only in vanilla 'C' not C++.

The current build of the compiler I have is 2.5.8, should I look to compiling a newer version? I read that Mikro of Mystic bytes used 3.3.6? to build Quake, should I look to that version?

I took a look at 4.1.0, but I'm not sure the atari will like it (tooooo big )

I don't want a cross compiler yet, this will be for a native 680x0 version.

cheers

karlm.

[Lautreamont]

I'm not an expert of gcc on Atari, but I know they started to drop support of older hosts with the 3.3 series (because there's nobody to maintain the code).

[karlm]

Thanks Lautreamont, that's exactly the kind of info I needed. So I guess Mikro's 3.3.6 port was probably the one I need. (Well v3.3.6 anyway)

Many thanks

karlm

[Wrathchild]

Hi,

I think 2.95 was around the last version supporting Atari?
But even so, it seemed 68020 and above was more supported
and plain 68000 lesser so and could have dropped earlier
(for the Atari that is)?

From Paul Coene's work on building uClinux for the Atari ST,
I was never able to properly build a set of cross-tools for this.
Probably because at that time I was using Cygwin as a build platform
and many bugs existed when doing things that way and people
recommended building under Linux instead. Certainly nowadays
the uClinux work has become integrated into the Linux source
distros and also work on getting cross-tools to build and compile
the uClinux under Cygwin has advanced a lot. But as you point out
the newer gcc versions don't support Atari ST anymore.

With the compilers I did get to build, those had issues with
code being generated that wouldn't assemble due to using
68020 and above syntax even though you were asking for
(and thought had built) 68000 only and no-fpu.

I have to admit I never quite got my head around the subtleties
of things like the PIC and pic flags (position independent code)
and if the m68k-elf or m68k-pic-coff toolchain would be better
suited for the ST. Is it known if the 3.3.6 work generates 68000,
no-fpu code OK?

I'd love to see an m68k-uclinux toolchain that could be used
to build an 68000 ST version and see Paul's work completed.
Probably not practical to use - but nice to see none the less.

Regards,
Mark

[mikro]

by some miracle i've found this thread ;)

but to the question: the latest stable, well-tested and quite good code generated version is 2.95.6 from SpareMiNT repository.

all the other's (zorro's, mine, patrice mandin's) are just experimental versions. for example the my one needs really expensive testing (and bugfixing!) -- it doesn't work correctly at all so I use a little trick: each source file is compiled against gcc 3.3.6 but the final linking is done with old 2.95.6 -- works great. But I think Zorro's one is much better... but much slower, too ;)