I have to compile and run a modern program on a cluster with an outdated OS. The program employs some c++11 features and STL templates. The cluster's compiler toolchain (g++ v 4.4.7) supports almost all of c++11 features, but some important STL templates/classes are missing.
To make it work I'll have to either:
modify the program's source code, or
compile a newer version of STL library on a cluster and link against it instead of system-wide STL libs.
The 1'st route seems sub-optimal, because the program is currently in an active development by our lab, and it means we'll need to patch it by hand daily, or make a separate branch and regularly merge from trunk, or drop the support for c++11 features altogether.
So, is it possible to build a libstdc++ version that is newer than the one installed system-wide, and link against it? And if it is possible, how could it be done?
Related
I have to compile 3 versions of gcc, say 9, 10 and 11.
My system gcc is version 8 (let's say).
Question : do I have any advantage on compiling gcc-v9 with gcc-v8, gcc-10 with gcc-v9 and gcc-v11 with gcc-v10 ?
Or I don't have any advantage and I can compile them all the gcc-v8 ?
Thank you for pointing out some directions for further research.
GCC has a "bootstrap" build process. So when you try to build gcc-11 with only gcc-8 installed, it will build a temporary "stage 1" version of gcc-11 using gcc-8, then compile gcc-11 again using gcc-11-stage1. Thus no matter what you start with, the version of gcc-11 that comes out of the build process was effectively compiled with itself.
So all that matters is that gcc-8, or whatever "system compiler" was previously installed, is able to build a stage1 version of gcc-11 that runs well enough to compile the stage 2 version. It doesn't matter whether your system compiler is good at optimizing, and gcc's source code is deliberately written to use a fairly minimal set of language feature (at least for stage 1), so you are not likely to run into trouble with your system compiler having missing or buggy support for obscure corners of the language. Historically, the "system compiler" was often not gcc at all, but some compiler provided by the computer vendor or an unrelated third party, and so one couldn't rely much on its quality; gcc was designed with that in mind.
Theoretically your system compiler could have a bug which miscompiles gcc-11-stage1 in such a way that it appears to work, but itself miscompiles stage2. This is unlikely, and it's even less likely that it would happen in a way that wasn't obvious (e.g. the stage2 compiler simply segfaulting). If worried, there's an option to have stage2 build a stage3 compiler, and then check that both versions are identical. So as long as the build completes, you can be pretty confident that the final installed compiler is fine and unaffected by bugs in the original system compiler. (All that said, a reference to Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" is obligatory here.)
So in practice, you don't need to worry about the version of gcc used to build a new version. Whatever you happen to have installed already, within reason, will be fine.
I downloaded the latest source code of Opensplice DDS from https://github.com/ADLINK-IST/opensplice and tried to build it by following its instructions (source setenv, source ./configure, then make ..) in my Cygwin 64 bit.
The build (make command) appeared to be completed, but a number of modules such as dcpsisocpp2, durability, spliced didn't get built (I can't find dcpsisocpp2.dll, etc).
I wonder if anyone who is familar with Opensplice's makefile system can direct me to solve the problem.
You should identify you are going to use community or enterprise version.
It seems the community version doesn't have spliced and durability services. Also, dcpsisocpp2 use C++03 which is a very old C++ standard, that when you use C++11 or C++14 writing your application, you might get some warning or error and spend lots of time fixing compile problems.
Try to use dcpssacpp which follows the C++11 standard.
I develop a utility in Go that requires recent version of sqlite. I'm interested only in targeting specific architecture, to be specific: x64 linux. I'm developing that utility on Mac OS X. I'm using go-sqlite3 driver. I use GNU Make + Glide to build my utility. In order to cross compile on my Mac I pass specific arch flags to make.
Repos on Linux platforms that I'm targeting usually have quite old versions of sqlite that don't have features that I need in my utility.
I can manually compile and install required version of sqlite on all the platforms that I need, but it is quite cumbersome. I wonder if there is a good way to either statically link a specific version of sqlite or somehow bundle a utility with specific version of sqlite dynamic library.
Even though I mention sqlite a lot, this question can be generalized to other libraries: how to bundle a golang app with a specific version of C library an outdated version of which may be installed on the target platform.
Also: how to better organize development of that utility so that other devs won't need to manually compile and install specific version of the library - the preference is to use Makefile that would build all the binaries for required target platform. I see that I can just copy code of specific version of library (e.g. sqlite) to my utility's repo though I wonder if there is a better option - maybe I can somehow use glide dependencies for that purpose and build library that I need as part of my other dependencies.
Ubuntu 16.04 comes with GCC 5.4 which does support c++11 and it is the default compiler. By default c++11 is not enabled in that particular version of GCC.
My intent is to use some of the binary libraries (not header only) from their repository (e.g. boost). In my projects I will enable c++ 11.
How were c++ libraries from the repository compiled? Is it possible to use them with c++ 11 enabled? I know that c++ libraries can be called from different languages (Java, Pythons, C# etc) by hiding all c++ stuff behind plain C interface. With boost it is not a case. If a certain function returns me a string or a vector or anything from STL then it is a problem. AFAIK STL objects binary representation depends on compiler flags (eg. std=c++11).
Thank you.
Which exact libraries are you talking about?
If you are talking about the standard library, libstdc++ is a part of gcc. It is always okay to link it no matter which standard you compile at. gcc also made a decision to include ABI tags, so that they can be ABI compatible with code compiled at C++11 and pre C++11. See for instance TC's really nice answer to a question I asked here:
Is this simple C++ program using <locale> correct?
If by
How were c++ libraries from the repository compiled?
you mean, how are all of the C++ libraries in the ubuntu repositories compiled, the answer is, it may be different for each one.
For instance if you want to use libfreetype6-dev or libsdl2-dev, these are C libraries, they will be okay to link to no matter what standard you target.
If you want to use libsilly-dev from CEGUI, that is a C++ library, and it is usually best to use the exact same compiler for your project and the C++ lib that you are linking to. If it appears in ubuntu repository, you can assume it was built with the default g++ version that ubuntu is shipping. If you need to use a different compiler, it's probably best to build the C++ lib yourself -- in general C++ is not ABI stable across different compilers, or even different versions of the same compiler.
If you want to use compiled boost libraries, it's probably best to use the libs they give you and use the compiler they give you. If you only use header-only boost, then the compiler doesn't matter since you don't actually have to link with something they built. So you then have more flexibility with respect to compilers.
Often, if you need to use C++ libraries, it's best to integrate their build system into yours so that it can be easily rebuilt from source and you only have to configure the compiler once. (At least in my experience.) This can save a lot of time when you decide to upgrade compilers later. If you use cmake then it's often feasible, but sometimes this can be hard, especially if you have a lot of C++ dependencies. If you don't use cmake, well, many libraries use cmake and it won't be that easy to integrate them this way. cmake is still kind of a pain anyways, so this might not be such a loss.
I am working on CentOS 6 machines, which has very old GCC/GlibC version. I want to build the whole glibc, binutils, gcc toolchain with latest or at least very recent versions in order to use c++11 support in latest gcc, and ld.gold in recent binutils, and possibly improvements in recent glibc.
I want to put the whole toolchain in some separate directory, and not to influence any existing system files. I also want to build gcc with --sys-root so that when using the gcc, I don't need to specify -I/some/directory/include and -L/some/directory/lib or whatever other parameters. Also the generated executable will automatically use the new ld-linux-xxxxx program loader which will automatically find the new libc.so.
Anyone knows if there exists some tutorial on this task?
The compiler is very dependent on glibc, altough you manage to build the compiler either in a chrooted system or equivalent, you will need to build also all libraries needed with the program you will build with this new compiler.
The best you can do is use a fresh new system (vm or whatever) or upgrade your existing one
You can download the latest toolchain from Openembedded or Yocto.
And here you don't have to do any package installation to your current system.
Just download the toolchain, source the environment and thats it you are ready to check the c++11 support.
The location to download the toolchain:
http://downloads.yoctoproject.org/releases/yocto/yocto-1.7/toolchain/ (Just select the architecture either 32bit or 64 bit based on your machine support)
If you need the latest toolchain, you'd better migrate to Fedora.
If you can't/won't, the best bet is to get the pieces as source RPMs for CentOS and Fedora, unpack them and fix up the CentOS by pilfering the sources and patches from Fedora, take care it doesn't overrule the system packages, correct versions and fix to install elsewhere (don't mess up your system too much! /usr/local comes to mind). The pieces are at least binutils, gcc.
I do not knwo Why you need this ? If this is needed that to compile for another computer, I would suggest using a virtual machine running the same OS as target. much more easier !!