XBBS compile on uport 286

[Michael Grenier]

>From article <7664 at saturn.ucsc.edu>, by lcc at ucscb.UCSC.EDU (73701000):
# In article <486 at ka3adu.UUCP> lester at ka3adu.UUCP (lester) writes:
#>I've been having a problem getting XBBS to compile on uport 286 
#>ver 2.3. I'm currently running XBBS ver 7.2.5 and am try to upgrade to the
#>latest version. I had this problem when I first tried to compile XBBS last 
#>year and somebody had a simple fix for it. 
#>
#>The error I get is;
#>
#>Assembler: bbsc1.c
#>          aline 13300  : Hash table overflow
# 
# That's bad code generation comming from the back end of the compiler. It
# most likely not a data structure that is too big because the front end of the 
# compiler does range checking that I think would have caught that 286
# pcc has several known bugs concerning code generation. You might try getting
# a different compiler. MetaWare Inc. of Santa Cruz, CA has a good one for 286
# UNIX that is very solid and produces very optimized, fast executing code.
# 


It has nothing to do with the compiler but is an assembler limitation.
This was fixed but Microport didn't have time to incorporate it into
the version 2.4 SDS Release. Basically the symbol table was set up as
an array of structures containing the name and various other information
(see COFF structures for a hint) and was limited to the Intel 64K
array size limitation. This was updated to be an array of pointers
to these structures which were allocated as needed limiting the assembler
to 16K  (sizeof (struct *) times 16K = 64K) symbols which should be plenty.

Check if Microport has any support left for an updated assembler.
This Microport V/AT system doesn't have any trouble compiling the XBBS
system. 

   -Mike Grenier
    mike at cimcor.mn.org
    uunet!rosevax!cimcor!mike