Notes on compiling tcl with icc

MS: When getting the data for Optimized compilation of tcl, I met a few problems when compiling tcl with Intel's icc6.0 compiler for linux [1]. This is how I (mostly) solved them.

Difficulty #1: icc writes to stderr even on succesful compilations without warnings, gcc does not. This was tripping part of the configure script.

Solution: write a driving script that intercepts the offending writing.

Difficulty #2: the configure script was producing an unusable set of macros (my guess is that the substitute headers provided with icc should also include a substitute for <features.h>).

Solution: use the "-D_GNU_SOURCE" flag

Difficulty #3: NOT THERE! This was a side-effect of my clumsy shell programming below (quoting issue, corrected now).

Difficulties #1 and #2 were solved by calling the compiler through the following script (which can certainly be improved to not use temp files by some better bash programmer than myself):

  #! /bin/sh

  if [ $# != 0 ]
  then

   ##
   ## REPLACEMENT for the icc script in order to compile tcl
   ##
   ## Replacement was needed because (AFAIU, which is not much):
   ##   (1) icc writes the filename to stderr even when it compiles
   ##       succesfully and with no warnings
   ##   (2) the configure script was producing an unusable set of flags,
   ##       and defining the macro _GNU_SOURCE fixed that. The problem
   ##       seems to be in the 64bit support headers; is this a
   ##       problem with icc or with tcl's configure script?
   ##

   eval /opt/intel/compiler60/ia32/bin/icc  -D_GNU_SOURCE '$@' > icc.out 2> icc.err;
   errCode=$?
   cat icc.out
   if (test $errCode -ne 0 || test ` cat icc.err | wc -l` -gt 1);
   then
    cat icc.err 1>&2
   fi
   exit $errCode

   ## END REPLACEMENT

  else
   exec -a "/opt/intel/compiler60/ia32/bin/icc" /opt/intel/compiler60/ia32/bin/iccbin;
  fi

Category Porting