GCC 3.3 Update for Mac OS X Available

snowtigger writes "The August 2003 GCC updater includes the new GCC 3.3 compiler in addition to other updates that will allow development of G5 optimized code with the December 2002 Mac OS X Developer Tools. This update is available to all ADC members from the Download Software area of the ADC web site (free registration required). It will be interesting to see what Steve Jobs will present in Paris tomorrow; is XCode ready?"

Comments

We'll find out in a couple of hours.

[so1omon]

The keynote starts at 1 AM Pacific time...

Re:We'll find out in a couple of hours.

[hype7]

there's going to be at least one of Steve's "oh, and one more thing" surprises:

http://99mac.com/nyhetsbilder/appleexpo2003/

In my experience stuff like that has only been covered up for new hardware...

-- james

Re:We'll find out in a couple of hours.

[mallie_mcg]

Tis the new Powerbook 15".

One of my friends just ordered one of these puppies, the manager of the store down here in .AU could give him price, and order it, but was not able to give specs. (WTF?!!?!) So this MUST be the one more thing, its gotta be swoit!

CHUD

[Pathwalker]

The GCC update has been out for a while, but it looks like last week Apple updated CHUD (the Computer Hardware Understanding Development toolkit) to version 3.0.

It lets you tweak configuration registers in almost all parts of the system, gather and graph lots of profile information (instruction mix, cache stalls, etc...) from programs, and lots of other cool things.

Re:CHUD

[andrewski]

Apple's kind of like the aunt who smoked a J with you when you were 17. They're cool like that.

Re:CHUD

[Wesley Felter]

Heh, CHUD will let you do anything except overclock your iBook.

Re:Binary compatibility

[Lally Singh]

The ABI is Mach-O or CFM. They both work on OS X. GCC uses it, Codewarrior uses it, the IBM XL compilers use it. Codewarrior also beats gcc in speed & quality of code like an abusive sibling*. Donno about the IBM compilers, but I assume they provide an even more severe beating.

* That was going to be a much more offensive analogy...

Fink

[therevolution]

Fink users: see this annoucement from the Fink developers regarding GCC 3.3 . It is probably a good idea to hold off on installing 3.3 until they add support for it.

Re:Fink

[jweatherley]

The old compilers are still there. Take a look in /usr/bin and you will see them:

bash-2.05a$ ls /usr/bin/gc*
/usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc2 /usr/bin/gcc-3.3
/usr/bin/gcc3

gcc is a symlink to whatever compliler you are currently using - so to go back to v3.1 just point it to gcc3. Similar stuff applies for g++.

Also Project Builder doesn't know about gcc3.3 without changing some of the compile options and will default to gcc2.95 so it is important to RTFM before updating!

Re:Fink

[transient]

Don't go messing with those symlinks unless you know what you're doing. Apple provides a tool called gcc_select for this purpose. If you run "gcc_select -n 2" it will show you what commands it runs to select GCC 2, and there are 60 of them. Not something you want to do by hand.

There's no man page for gcc_select (not on my Mac anyway) but "gcc_select -h" will get you some brief help.

Panther and/or Powerbooks

[MalleusEBHC]

I doubt Apple will release XCode separate from Panther. However, I would not be surprised in the least to hear that Panther is released in but a few short hours. At the very worst, I expect Steve to finally announce a specific date for Panther's release.

On the other hand, the question of what we will hear (if anything) about the Powerbooks is beyond my ability to prognosticate. On one hand, I think that they *must* finally be coming out. I mean, it's the year of the laptop and we haven't seen anything since January. However, reportedly the holdup has been because of Motorola's inability to produce the 7457 in quantity, in which case you can never be sure how long they will drag their feet.

Re:Panther and/or Powerbooks

[TheRaven64]

I just ordered a 15" powerbook. I asked two questions:

1. Is it worth waiting for new PowerBooks (i.e. are there going to be new ones released at Paris)?
2. Is it worth waiting for Panther?

The answer to the first question was `We never comment on products until they have been anounced. If, hypothetically speaking, new ones were to be announced by Steve in his keynote next week [this was last week] then we would automatically upgrade your order to the new model'.

The answer to question two was `Don't expect to see Panther before Christmas, or maybe early next year'.

IBM Compilers

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has also released their own cc compiler's for use with the g5 which are supposed to be faster than gcc. They even give instructions as to how to incorporate into project builder and Xcode if I remember. Anyone tried this?

Re:IBM Compilers

[proj_2501]

anyone looking for the IBM XL C and XL C++ compiler beta can look here

i doubt this will remain free. better snag it now!

Re:C# in X-code

[stu_coates]

I'm similarly disgusted at the omission of BrainFuck... come on Apple, what are you playing at? We developers demand support for more languages.

Re:Silly question:

[noselasd]

You won't need gcc, what made you think that ?

Fink does not like the 3.3 compiler...

[Domini]

From the Fink site:


2003-06-26: Developer Tools Update.

Quick Summary: DO NOT INSTALL THIS UPDATE.

Apple has released a patch to the December 2002 Developer Tools which includes gcc 3.3, their new compiler.

Fink does not yet support compiling with gcc 3.3. In addition, it is important not to "mix and match" between compilers: all C++ code in fink packages needs to be compiled with the same compiler.

For this reason, the Fink team recommends that if you update your Developer Tools with the new patch, you should be careful to run sudo gcc_select 3 prior to any "fink build" or "fink install" commands.

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

It works as advertised.

It's _very_ fast too.

Re:Silly question:

[babbage]

GCC is for compiling software from raw source code. If you're downloading open source software, you generally need a compiler to install it, because the software frequently isn't distributed in an executable form. Even if an executable form is available, most open source projects don't have the resources to provide version for every esoteric configuration people might be using (like, say, OSX -- most of this stuff is written for Linux after all, so OSX is a bit "exotic" from the average Linux developer's point of view).

If you're not developing software and you don't intend to install open source software from raw source, then you don't need a compiler.

Re:Binary compatibility

[BlackFingolfin]

Sorry to say but you are talking complete nonsense.

First off, this was about the C++ ABI used by GCC, which indeed changed (again!) between GCC 3.1 and 3.3, meaning that C++ code is incompatbile between those versions.

Next, Mach-O and CFM are binary executable formats, which is a whole other story. Besides, you make it sound as if they were the same, when in fact they are not. They are two very different formats. CFM is the one used traditonally, the only one supported by classic MacOS. Max OS X also supports it, and in fact if you want your Carbon programs to run both on OS 9 and OS X, you have to supply them in CFM. However, GCC is *not* able of outputting CFM. The only C/C++ compiler running on OS X which support this is (AFAIK) MetroWerks CodeWarrior.

Mach-O is the binary format of choice for anything else which only runs on OS X, and it's the only format GCC and the IBM XL compiler support (on OS X, that is).

Re:Binary compatibility

[Lally Singh]

It's not complete nonsense :-P

The ABI that matters is for C on OS X. Carbon uses it. Even Objective-C & Cocoa use it (the calls are mapped to a C call).

As for C++ ABI... I'm asking someone who knows :-) bbl.

Meaning of new options?

[Brad Lucier]

Anyone know what these options mean? They are mentioned as being turned on by the new -fast option, but they seem to be Apple-specific and don't appear in the documentation file://Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools/gcc- 3.3/gcc/index.html

-frelax-aliasing
-fgcse-mem-alias
-floop-transpose
-floop-to-memset
-fload-after-store
-fgcse-loop-depth
-fdisable-typechecking-for-spec

That last one sounds like a good one ;-), but I'm wondering if it can screw up my programs that might rely on stricter semantics, so I'd like to know what it does.

Re:Binary compatibility

[Lally Singh]

CFM & Mach-O are the OS 9 & OS X binary executable formats. They can be as different as they want internally, but they're serving the same purpose. I think we're in agreement here.

My point was that the C ABI is standard atop of these, and that that's the ABI that's most important. I'll post when I get the right info on the C++ ABI compatibility...

Re:I want xcode!

[Maserati]

O'Reilly's MacDev center

CocoaDev.com

Both have entry-level ProjectBuilder tutorials, including the famous one-line web browser (CocoaDev) and text editor (O'Reilly) tutorials.

You want a Processor Upgrade!

[javaxman]

Seriously, it's well worth the money to get yourself a processor upgrade card given the machine you've just bought. I'm pretty sure you can upgrade to 800Mhz or 1GHz for a reasonable price. This is what has kept prices for these machines and Cubes so high. It'll more than double your performance considering the added cache, and that'll make a big difference if you're compiling. Also max out your RAM, it's cheap.

Rather than complain about the puck, dual-button+scrollwheel optical USB mice are super-cheap, get one.

Project Builder is already pretty damn sweet, and has been for some time. Try it out now, it'll make the transition to Xcode smoother for you.