Re: Check whether AC_PROG_X has failed

[Shahbaz Youssefi]

I see, so AC_PROG_CC cannot "optionally fail"?

No matter. Particularly regarding AC_PROG_CXX, I am aware that you can add
a test then to check if the compiler works, but that is essentially a
duplicate of what AC_PROG_CXX was supposed to do, no?

As a side note, why does AC_PROG_CXX set the CXX variable to g++ even if it
knows for sure that g++ doesn't exist? This is according to the
documentation (
https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/C_002b_002b-Compiler.html
)

> If none of those checks succeed, then as a last resort set CXX to g++

What does AC_PROG_CXX hope to achieve by setting CXX to something that it
knows doesn't work?


On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Nick Bowler <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 2014-11-28 11:51 +0100, Shahbaz Youssefi wrote:
> > The problem is that if you call AC_PROG_CXX, even if there are no C++
> > compilers, *CXX is set to g++ anyway* and the macro doesn't provide a
> means
> > to understand if it actually succeeded or not. This is a problem because
> if
> > you want to enable a feature only if a C++ compiler exists, you need to
> be
> > able to well, check if there is a C++ compiler. This is the relevant
> Stack
> > Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/27111000/912144
> >
> > Now I'm by no means an expert with m4, but I think I could hack away at
> > this. Before sending a patch however, I wanted to make sure if the idea
> is
> > acceptable.
>
> To contrast: AC_PROG_CC behaviour is to fail hard if no C compiler is
> found (or if certain tests of it fail).
>
> You may find that defining what "succeeded" means for AC_PROG_CXX
> will be hard to do.  But you can always do something like this in
> configure.ac (totally untested):
>
>   AC_PROG_CXX
>
>   AC_LANG([C++])
>   AC_CACHE_CHECK([whether the C++ compiler works], [my_cv_cxx_works],
>     [AC_COMPILE_IFELSE([AC_LANG_PROGRAM([#include <iostream>],
>                          [std::cout << "Hello, World" << std::endl;])],
>       [my_cv_cxx_works=yes], [my_cv_cxx_works=no])])
>
>   AS_IF([test x"$my_cv_cxx_works" != x"yes"],
>     [AC_MSG_ERROR([sorry, can't help you])])
>
> Perhaps AC_PROG_CXX would be improved by simply performing a test like
> the above at the end.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)
>