Hi Ludo,

A number of compilers claim to be GCC, without actually being GCC.  This
has come to a point where they can hardly be distinguished–until one
actually tries to use them.

this suggests that you shouldn't be testing for GCC, and instead should be
testing for support for particular features.  For example, to know if nested
functions are supported you would have your configure script compile a mini
program that uses nested functions.

Ciao, Duncan.


I had the following macro to determine whether plug-in support is
available:

   
https://gforge.inria.fr/scm/viewvc.php/trunk/m4/gcc.m4?view=markup&revision=5169&root=starpu&pathrev=5202

The macro is fairly elaborate.  Yet, ICC 12.0.1 and Clang 3.4 both pass
the test, because:

   - They support ‘--version’;

   - They define ‘__GNUC__’, which defeats Autoconf’s
     ‘_AC_LANG_COMPILER_GNU’.

   - They support ‘-print-file-name’, and have ‘-print-file-name=plugin’
     return GCC’s (!) plug-in header directory.  To that end, ICC simply
     runs ‘gcc -print-file-name=plugin’, while Clang appears to be doing
     some guesswork.

It turns out that ICC manages to build a working GCC plug-in, so after
all, it may be “entitled” to define ‘__GNUC__’, in a broad sense.

Conversely, Clang doesn’t support several GNU extensions, such as nested
functions, so it quickly fails to compile code.

Based on that, I modified my feature test like this:

   
https://gforge.inria.fr/scm/viewvc.php/trunk/m4/gcc.m4?root=starpu&r1=5169&r2=5203

I don’t see what can be done on “our” side (perhaps Autoconf’s feature
test could be strengthened, but how?), but I wanted to document this
state of affairs.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

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