Sun Studio 12 and Apache STDCXX

This is mostly a self-reminder

I attended aKademy 2008 and there are so many things to write about I don’t even know what to start with. I’ll probably write something in a few days, when I’m feeling less sick (thanks to a Flemish waiter who had the OpenBossa guys, Knut and I waiting for almost one hour for dinner, I got a cold).

As you may know, part of my job (and hobby, too) consists on “shaking” software to make it compile on different platforms and with different compilers: I port Linux software which builds with gcc to Windows with Visual C++, or Visual C++ to MingW, or… well, whatever. It’s funny.

Back on topic: Wednesday as the Sun tutorials day and I got immediately interested in Sun Studio. Message to Sun Microsystems people: your installer is so broken on Linux it is impossible to make it work on Debian and Ubuntu (and I guess on anything other than RHEL). The only way I found to “install” SS12 was to download the Express version, remove the sh-code and untar the resulting package. It works but it’s so nasty hardly anybody would try that.

Sun Studio 12 is 100% ISO C++ compliant, which means support for wchar_t is not as good as most applications require nowadays. The best way to overcome this limitation is to use Apache Foundation’s STDCXX to replace SS12’s STL (which is STLport 4 (according to Adriaan, stdcxx would roughly correspond to STLport 6)

Building STDCXX is relatively easy, if you know the tricks:

• export PATH=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/:$PATH
• export CC=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/suncc
• export CPP=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/suncc
• export CXX=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/sunCC
• You should be able to do this step by exporting CFLAGS, etc but it won’t work, so edit stdcxx-4.2.1/etc/config/sunpro.config and:

• Replace
  CXXFLAGS= -library=%none
  with
  CXXFLAGS = -library=no%Cstd -YI,/path/to/source/of/stdcxx/include/
• Replace
  CPPFLAGS =
  with
  CPPFLAGS = -YI,/path/to/source/of/stdcxx/include/
• Replace
  LDFLAGS= -library=%none
  with
  LDFLAGS = -library=no%Cstd

At the moment, I’m trying to get Wt built with Sun Studio 12 on Linux. Given that SS12 is the compiler of choice for KDE4 on Solaris, I may try to get KDE4 built on Linux with SS12 at a later stage. That would help both the Solaris port and the Linux code.

PS: Hello Planet KDE