17 Apr
2011
17 Apr
'11
3:47 p.m.
On 16/04/11 17:48, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
And don't get me started on the (bloody expensive
btw) commercial software
for it. With pearls like this one: A GUI that claims to be for X11 ... only
it was written by taking the Windows version and "porting it" (presumably,
from the look of things, done by an overworked and underskilled intern)
to X11 by compiling it against a library that emulates enough of the Windows
build environment to get it to work on X11. The result is ... bloody damn
unusable and of course the application still thinks it is running on Windows.
Dare I ask if you're referring to Xilinx's "wonderful" ISE Design
System?
Altera seemingly learned a lesson long ago: sometimes software is just
too old to maintain. Compared to ISE (and even the old Altera MAX+PLUS
development system), Quartus is a dream to use. ISE has more bugs (I've
found several Logic Synthesizer bugs in ISE, none in Quartus), is less
stable (on average several crashes per day; I've never seen Quartus
crash)...
You'll only need one guess to figure out why I prefer the Altera chips,
despite their little quirks. I love the direct-drive LVDS transceivers
on Xilinx chips, but I can live with the three-resistor driver on the
Altera chips...
Well, gcc is an interesting choice as by its very
nature it is very, very
far from trivial. It currently supports 7 languages in the standard pack
(plus another 8 not in the default build) as well as 20 different cpu
architectures in the standard build (plus a ton more in different versions).
That is not exactly what I would choose as a starter project in open source
hacking.
I once tried to fix a bug in the gcc lm32 arch. All I got for my trouble
was a really big headache... I think I'll leave it to the folks with
long, grey beards, coke-bottle glasses and suspenders in future...
Can't say I've ever found a bug in the gcc x86 or x86_64 architectures
though. That said, they're probably the most intensively tested (and
used) of all the gcc archs, so it's hardly surprising... LM32 is a minor
footnote by comparison.
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/