🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently posted the following question about using the same 
code for transputers with and without iserver-I/O. I got quite a
number of answers (thank you all for the speedy help), which might be
of general interest. 

I'm absolutely no expert in what I talk about here, I'm just trying to
summarize what all the experts told me :-)
Feel free to send me further comments, hints, suggestions, flames...

The question was:

>   I have a problem concerning the INMOS ANSI C toolset. I am using 
>   a 4-transputer configuration, where all transputers are connected to
>   each other. Additionally, each transputer uses his link 0 to communicate
>   with his personal iserver. So I have to start 4 iservers on my host
>   and can watch all kinds of trace output from the net. Very nice.
>   
>   The problem is: Now that my program works better, I usually switch
>   the tracing off, so that only the root transputer does any host-I/O.
>   But I still have to start 4 iservers, otherwise the system hangs.
>   
>   To me it looks as if there is some mysterious communication between
>   iserver and transputer, even if I don't call any I/O-function. So if
>   there is no iserver there, the transputer will wait forever for the
>   iserver to respond. 
>   
>   What can I do ? I would like to decide at configuration time if I
>   want a host connection or not. I'd very much appreciate if anybody
>   out there could give me a hint about that. 

Summary of answers: 

There is no way but using the reduced library, if you don't want to
provide an iserver for each transputer in a multitransputer program
where each transputer has its own main()-function, because main()
always tries to get the command line arguments from its iserver,
unless it was linked with the reduced library..

So I maintain 2 different versions now, one linked with the complete
library, the other linked with the reduced library and a dummies-library 
with empty printf(), fprintf() etc. So I have to compile only once.
The root transputer gets the full version, while all others are
loaded with the reduced version. I'm not really fond of two
different versions floating around, but alas - what can I do ? :-(

I always thought that the use of the reduced library is optional, 
but it seems to be mandatory in this case.

Norbert Kuck
stud2@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
: iserver required although no I/O is done ?
Keywords: