David Abrahams wrote:
I would be very surprised if nobody has tried before since HP is a top-tier vendor
I have tried, but not in the last 9 months. HP may be "top-tier" but if so their compilers have not proven to be of the same caliber as the rest of the company, at least when it comes to compiling Boost code. The number and severity of the compiler bugs, and the poor quality of the error messages, made the job infeasibly hard.
If you have notes that might be useful or helpful for me (to save me time), I would appreciate it. I have been quite successful in porting code over to aC++ over the years and have reported several compiler/linker/debugger bugs to the HP response center and worked with them to fix problems or find workarounds. The last one I helped fix was the ANTLR parser generator.
I'm afraid I don't. It couldn't deal properly with integral constant expressions as template members, IIRC. The worst problems were internal compiler errors that simply crashed the compiler unceremoniously. Trying to narrow down the cases that failed to anything reasonably small was very difficult, and even then the results provided few or no clues as to possible workarounds.
It was I who 'tried' to compile on HPUX and run the regression tests. I would be happy to help porting boost to HPUX. We've given up for the exact reasons Dave mentions: ICE's the whole time although isolating the problems in a small sample is very hard. And behaving differently on a big source file compared to a small source file (using the same features) reveals (to me) that the compiler is of very low quality. So trying to isolate problem situations is hard and the aCC people seem not very interested either so I figured that it was not worth the effort. Now is you say that you have good experience and you want to help to push the limits of aCC and you think we can get good response from HP, I'm willing to give it another go !!!
My suggestion for HP-UX? gcc. But I suggest you install it from a .depot file because compiling gcc on HPUX might be very hard.
toon