Miscellaneous Solaris build problems

I’m sure these things are obvious to seasoned Solaris developers, but here are a few things I’ve learned today:

  • gcc 3.4.3 does not support threads on Solaris. The “-pthread” option doesn’t exist for Solaris except in later versions, so upgrade your compiler or use the Sun compiler (where you’ll use “-mt” to request threaded code).
  • scons on Solaris assumes you are using a Sun compiler and applies flags as such, even when you’re using gcc. Yes, even if it detects and uses gcc. See the note about “-KPIC” in the scons changelog.
  • boost doesn’t really compile on Solaris with Sun C++ 5.8, but you can hack stuff to make it sorta work.
    This relates to boost 1.40.0. There are two main issues:

    • int64_t and friends don’t get defined. You’ll have to patch cstdint.hpp. Here’s my hacked replacement.
    • The Sun compiler doesn’t do return object optimization, which means that code like:

      class Foo {
      private:
      Foo(Foo& f);
      public:
      explicit Foo(int i);
      };

      Foo bar(int x) {
      return Foo(x);
      }

      doesn’t work. The call to Foo(x) works fine, but the compiler thinks you need to copy the resulting Foo object in the act of returning it to the caller, which is commonly optimized out these days. Here’s a replacement for the affected boost/thread/detail/thread.hpp. Of course boost 1.41 doesn’t have the same problem since the return type for the affected function is different.

For reference, a couple of illustrative error messages:

  • int64_t problem:

    "/home/daniel/boost_1_40_0/boostdir/include/boost/date_time/time_duration.hpp", line 264: Error: int64_t is not a member of boost.
    "/home/daniel/boost_1_40_0/boostdir/include/boost/date_time/time_resolution_traits.hpp", line 48: Error: int64_t is not a member of boost.
  • Return value optimization problem:

    "/home/daniel/boost_1_40_0/boostdir/include/boost/thread/detail/thread.hpp", line 344: Error: boost::thread::thread(boost::thread&) is not accessible from boost::move(boost::detail::thread_move_t).

I’m sure that most of my audience will find this incomprehensible, but I have high hopes that Google will index this properly and find it for a poor head-scratching soul with similar frustrations.

Have a nice day!

  1. “I have high hopes that Google will index this properly and find it for a poor head-scratching soul with similar frustrations.”

    Mission accomplished. Thanks for the hack. 🙂

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