Intel 7.0 Compiler problems

From: klapshin klapshin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-02-05 20:05:40

Hello,

Tired of MSVC deficiencies, and hoping to get certain performance 
increase I got evaluation version of Intel C++ compiler. I've heard 
lots of good things about this compiler, and was under impression
that 
transition from MSVC to ICL should be very smooth. Huh, I had all 
kinds of troubles.

First of all boost 1.29 gave up saying that it is an unknown
compiler. 
Looking into config I figured that last known ICL was 6.0, so I just 
hacked it badly by redefining ICL as 600 prior to including any boost 
headers. I understand that it is not a good way, but hey, I am just 
evaluating it.

Ok now everything compiled, but code using regex failed to link. No 
wonder, I have not build regex library with new compiler. It turns
out 
that there is no makefile for any intel compiler, so I tried to do it 
with bjam, but seems that bjam did not set CC variable; it invoked 
compilation with just line of flags. At this point I gave up and 
decided to focus on parts of my project which do not depend on regex.

Next surprise was when I tried to run tests, in debug mode everything 
was fine, but release mode failed miserably. It appears that
date_time 
library does not work at all with optimization. Even setting /O1 did 
not help, only /Od worked. 

Failures were in very basic date operations, for instance 

boost::gregorian::date(2002,12,27) == 
boost::gregorian::date(2002,12,27)

is not true!

If I first construct a date, then ask for year, it throws, saying
year 
is out of range.

I searched through Boost Users and Dev mailing lists, found few posts 
discussing turning on strict ansi checks on intel, and also that in 
this case it is better to use STLport, since STL coming with MSVC 
could not be compiled in ansi mode. I tried to do that but can't 
compile STLport in strict mode either. Using STLport in regular mode 
did not have any effect on problems I am having.

Here is version the compiler reports:

Intel(R) C++ Compiler for 32-bit applications, Version 7.0   Build 
20021018Z

Copyright (C) 1985-2002 Intel Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Now, my question is: are these problems well known? If they are, is 
there any plans to fix them in next release?

And while we at it, when should we expect new release? I know there 
were some discussions about mid-February, is there any update?

Regards,

Kirill.