Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

News posted June 10th, 2004 by eric
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The university of Szeged has just released three Symbian compatible releases of the gcc compiler based on more recent GCC build. The goal of this port was to get rid of errors when the GCC optimisation options were activated. The Symbian GCC Improvement Project has released three differents version of its work:

-  GCC 2.9-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 3/546) This version contains the patched GCC 2.9-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 546) and the original supporting toolchain. This release is a fix of the original Symbian toolchain to support optimisations.

-  GCC 2.95.3-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 11/546) This version contains GCC 2.95.3 extended to support the Symbian target and modified to run on Cygwin 98r2 host. The toolchain is from GCC 2.9-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 546).

-  GCC 3.0-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 6/546) This version contains GCC 3.0 compiler core and backend joined with the C++ frontend of GCC 2.97 (20010205), extended to support the Symbian target and modified to run on Cygwin 98r2 host. The toolchain is from GCC 2.9-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 546).

Benchmarks shows a possible decrease of up to 10% in code size with a 20% increased in speed.

Note: Be aware that according to Symbian, the choice of gcc optimisation that are in the current toolchain is there for some very good reasons (I do not have more details).

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On June 11th, 2004 Anonymous said:

All i can say is excellent! The new compilers are awesome, if not a little bit too picky about code.

What i observed is that 2.95.3 was great if you need to compile for small size, and 3.0 was quite some bit larger but faster aswell.

In my own tests i'd say an the increase in speed of 20% is accurate, maybe even a little more. Definately worth a try.

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On June 13th, 2004 Anonymous said:
If you're looking for both performance and size decrese then gcc 3.0 combined with ecompxl is the way to go(example program I tried with got definetely some 10%-20% speed increase and got reduced in size under half of what it was).

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On June 14th, 2004 eric said:

Installation instructions:

Backup your current epoc32\gcc folder (to be on the safe side), and then copy and overwrite the folder with the arhive's gcc folder. DON'T delete the currently present folder before copying the new folder. There might be files present in it which are required for the Symbian SDK to function. Try out some sample applications and keep your fingers crossed.

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On June 28th, 2004 eric said:

A new build of gcc 3.0-psion-98r2 has been released. The new build number is 7/546. It contains two modifications compared to build 6/546:

-  the irritating "no newline at end of file" preprocessor warning is disabled, and
-  an arm back-end bug, which caused to produce illegal asm instructions is fixed.

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On June 29th, 2004 eric said:

I have tried the GCC3.0 7/546 with my Codewarrior IDE. The code seems to compile correctly but I always get an error "COPY FOR DUP FAILED, handle in 0 6!!" at the beginning of the compilation process.

And I am not very sure that the Codewarrior IDE is still able to locate the errors in the source files (i.e. you get the compilation errors but the corresponding source code is not displayed - definitely not convenient).

Eric

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On July 9th, 2004 Akos Kiss (not verified) said:
Gcc 2.95.3-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 12/546) and gcc 3.0-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 8/546) is released. These new builds no longer throw COPY FOR DUP FAILED errors when used with Metrowerks' CodeWarrior IDE.

> Update your Symbian GCC toolchain

On December 17th, 2004 Anonymous said:

Do tou know how to get GCC to build with -O0 (optimisation disabled) ? I would like to disable optimisation, so that "useless" variables are not discarded, and no lines would be combined or reordered.

This would make dubugging easier.