Error building ELLCC

Question

Running the build script from ELLCC results in this error

gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../../../src/binutils/binutils  -I. -I../../../src/binutils/binutils -I../bfd -I../../../src/binutils/binutils/../bfd -I../../../src/binutils/binutils/../include -I./../intl -DLOCALEDIR="\"/Library/Caches/Homebrew/ellcc--svn-HEAD/lib/share/locale\"" -Dbin_dummy_emulation=bin_vanilla_emulation  -W -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wshadow -Werror -Wno-unused-value -Wno-shadow  -MT nm.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/nm.Tpo -c -o nm.o ../../../src/binutils/binutils/nm.c
../../../src/binutils/binutils/nm.c:1690:28: error: 'sbrk' is deprecated
      [-Werror,-Wdeprecated-declarations]
      char *lim = (char *) sbrk (0);
                           ^
/usr/include/unistd.h:582:7: note: 'sbrk' declared here
void    *sbrk(int);
         ^

The following compilers have been used with the same result:

• gcc 4.8
• llvm-gcc 2.8
• llvm 3.3

Answer 1

I had the same issue compiling binutils-2.24 on Mac OSX Mavericks 13.2.0 with clang. Thanks to Richard Pennington's suggestion, I was able to get binutils to compile by specifying a few other -Wno-error arguments to gcc by setting CFLAGS before running configure. Namely, these are the commands I ran to build and install binutils:

CFLAGS="-Wno-error=deprecated-declarations -Wno-error=unused-variable -Wno-error=unused-function" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/toolchain-arm-linux-elf --target=arm-linux-elf
make
make install

EDIT: I just noticed that the binutils configure script accepts an --disable-werror argument, which disables gcc turning warnings into errors, and removes the need for the settings CFLAGS. With this argument, building could be done as follows:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/toolchain-arm-linux-elf --target=arm-linux-elf --disable-werror
make
make install

Answer 2

This error is occurring because sbrk() is deprecated on OSX, -Werror is enabled for the binutils build, and the compiler (in this case "gcc" is an alias for clang) rightly complains about the use of sbrk(). I'll be looking into eliminating this error this weekend when I won't have to be at my day job. ;-)

I looked into it a bit more. This happened because the latest version of OS X (Mavericks) uses clang as its compiler and /usr/include/unistd.h has a deprecated declaration of sbrk().

The solution was to add a -Wno-error=deprecated-declarations option to the CFLAGS for binutils. I also had to make a few other changes to complete the Max OS build. You can find the latest stuff in the ELLCC subversion tree.