Irix, Mipspro and gcc

davea · *nix forums beginner Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 6

I don't recall restrictions in the use of IRIX cc when not licensed.
The intent was to ensure that you would always be able to bootstrap
yourself from a crashed disk because even without getting a compiler
license (say on a holiday weekend or when Mountain View CA had
no power for some reason) you could get your IRIX machine back into
operation.
by compiling things. The intent of the warnings was to make you
really want to get a valid license as soon as practical...

The freeware gcc (3.3) is usable but emits bad .debug_frame information
so dbx and frame-unwinding-via-libexc.so don't work.
Nonetheless, g++ exception handling does work (it does not use
libexc.so).
In the case of gcc -mabi=64 the .debug_frame information is even worse,
unfortunately (bad mistakes). I'm not sure if these were fixed in
later gcc
releases.

In spite of these problems, gcc is your best choice.
David A

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