Bobulate

Sun Studio has been renamed Solaris Studio, to reflect its target OS — or maybe just to say that Sun has been consumed by the boa constrictor that is Oracle. Of course, Studio works on Linux as well, so the name is now a misnomer in other ways.

Solaris Studio 12.2 is out, a minor upgrade over 12.1. The KDE4 on OpenSolaris project is one of the biggest public consumers of the C++ compiler — I suppose VirtualBox is as well, although that project never led to much C++ technology being updated in Solaris. Pavel was active during the beta phase of this product, and was the first person to report a regression in the C++ compiler: the -Y flag (in particular, -YP, which is documented to prepend directories to the linker’s search path) changed behavior. Now, historically the -YP flag has been different between the C and C++ compilers (duh?), and code consolidation pushed the C behavior into C++.

Unfortunately, the documentation hasn’t been updated to reflect this change. Neither has the regression been fixed. In other words, a bug reported pretty much on day 1 of the beta, shipped unchanged three months later.

We (as in the KDE4 on OpenSolaris crew) are creative enough to adapt to this situation: instead of using -YP to prepend paths, we can set the whole search path (like we would in C) like so: -YP,/opt/kde4/lib:/usr/lib . There’s one big gotcha, though: the C++ runtime and standard libraries live in the compiler installation directory, which must be searched for them. So we end up with a situation like this: if it’s Studio 12.1, use -YP,/opt/kde4/lib (nothing else, since the compiler libraries and /usr/lib are searched already) and if it’s Studio 12.2, first find out where the compiler libraries are installed (typically, but not necessarily, /opt/solstudio12.2) and then use -YP,/opt/kde4/lib:/usr/lib:/opt/solstudio12.2/lib . And don’t forget to adjust for different architectures (x86 vs amd64 vs SPARC).

In short: Solaris Studio 12.2, don’t bother.

Of course, a compiler isn’t the most important thing for Oracle. That’s just enabling technology and I imagine that it just needs to be good enough to push their in-house code to production. ISVs apparently don’t contribute enough to the bottom line to give them the tools to use the OS as well.