Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 16:36:52 +0100
From: "Th. Eifert" <EIFERT AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Subject: Re: Catastrophic problems with v. 1.12
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Reply-To: eifert AT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de
Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen

> Having asked twice for confirmation of successful compilation of
> production programs (bigger than the tiny test.bat's) without any
> result, I come to the conclusion that djgpp v. 1.12 is not
> heavily used for production purposes.
> 
> This is somehow surprising, but reflects my own mixed experiences
> with it from version 1.11 on.
> 
> 
> Problem areas:
> 
>    -  Memory allocation is still buggy. Library calls of spawn
>       and stat often result in segment violation at malloc+200.
>    
>    -  Free physical memory reported is wrong when chunks bigger
>       than 4096 bytes are requested by malloc or sbrk.
>    
>    -  Debugging of real world applications using spawn is very
>       difficult because the topline of go32 is not updated when
>       the spawned program terminates.
>    
>    -  When spawning to another exe (e.g. as.exe), topline often
>       shows something like 2M of swapped out ram, 244K of used
>       ram and 16K of free ram in a system with 12M free xms ram
>       where swapping should not occur at all. It then spends most
>       of the time in real mode and execution is extremely slowed
>       down.
> 
>    - Calling system("mybat.bat arg1 arg2") hangs.
> 
> 
> DJ recently suggested to set keepmem=0. The net effect is that
> crashes are a somewhat less frequent, but still occur at exactly
> the same location in malloc+200.
> 
> Having reported the memory problems to DJ in May without any
> useful help, I am on the point to abandon djgpp with a sad
> feeling.
> 
> Maybe he will be happy to get rid of my questions.
> 
> Enclosed the symified dumps that prove the problems mentioned
> above.
> 
You mention that all the above problems occur also in 1.11 !?

Having installed 1.11m[12345], I successfully compiled (and got
to run) "real production Software", including some f77-sources
(f2c'ed), some "real" libraries I received in source and so on,
each of those being of reasonable size and cpu consumption.

Therefore I don't see that djgpp is as terrible as You wrote.

If You like to, You may contact me directly to discuss the
details of our resp. installation.

Hope it helps,

Thomas Eifert



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 | Thomas Eifert                                                    |
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