DEC Unix and string too long with templates

DEC Unix and string too long with templates

[Greg Galloway]

I have once again run into the symbol too long error message from the
DEC Unix assembler.  When running DEC Unix 3.2, the simple solution was to
turn debugging off.  Now with 4.0, I can still get the error even without
debugging.  Corey Kosak and Joe Buck posted back in October that the common
work-around is to subclass string.  Does anyone have the code to do this
lying around somewhere that they could make available?  Could we put something
about this error in the FAQ?  Is it possible to use GAS under DEC Unix to
get around this problem?

Thanks,
Greg
--
Gregory L. Galloway
Research Scientist I

http://eoeml.gtri.gatech.edu/home/gregg/

Re: DEC Unix and string too long with templates

[Joe Buck]

> I have once again run into the symbol too long error message from the
> DEC Unix assembler.  When running DEC Unix 3.2, the simple solution was to
> turn debugging off.  Now with 4.0, I can still get the error even without
> debugging.  Corey Kosak and Joe Buck posted back in October that the common
> work-around is to subclass string.

The basic idea is simple enough:

class MyString : public string {
public:
	// declare constructors
	// declare assignment operators
};

that is, you have to redeclare the things that don't inherit.

> Is it possible to use GAS under DEC Unix to get around this problem?

Yes (gas has no limit on symbol length).  Even so, the names are too long,
meaning you spend a lot of disk space on debug information.
The snapshots have an experimental solution, the -fsquangle flag, which
uses a new name mangling scheme that is a lot more compact for template
names ... but it will be a while before that can be made available.

Re: DEC Unix and string too long with templates

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   From: Joe Buck <jbuck@synopsys.com>
   Date: Mon, 4 May 98 17:49:44 PDT

   > Is it possible to use GAS under DEC Unix to get around this problem?

   Yes (gas has no limit on symbol length).

Unfortunately, gas on Digital Unix does not generate the exception
information which the Digital Unix linker expects, so you get linker
warnings when linking objects created by gas.

Even more unfortunately, Digital Unix uses ECOFF, and the gas ECOFF
support is closely derived from mips-tfile, and actually does have a
limit on symbol length, of 8K.

These problems can, of course, be fixed.  However, until they have
been, I don't recommend using gas on Digital Unix.  I don't know of
anybody working on them.

Ian