Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Saturday, 23 March 2002

# 3 AM

I spent much of the afternoon trying to build the source code for my current project for work. This is a gigabyte or so of proprietary software, which has never before been built outside of the client's internal development environment, and hoo boy does it show. There are hardwired paths all over the place, often hardwired to some engineer's home directory, which of course I don't have a copy of. And it probably wouldn't do me any good if I did, because it would be executables that only work on a SPARC running Solaris whereas I need it on a PC running Linux. In some places, the code itself has embedded assumptions that are only true of Solaris, or only of the ancient buggy compiler they've used to compile the "host-side tools" to date. (This thing, the "native compiler," is even older than the old compiler I've been complaining about all along. It's 2.7 era GCC, which means its C++ implementation dates to when nobody was even talking about standardizing the language.)

So it was not a terribly enjoyable afternoon.

On the up side, I got to rip out more floating point gunk, including the infamous do_float_handler (well, okay, not that infamous).