Alexander Hulpke writes in his e-mail message of 1993/06/09

The subject line sais most: Has anyone compiled (and run) GAP
succesfully on a DEC alpha machine? I can compile it successfully, but
the garbage collector will crash.

GAP wont run on DEC Alpha machines. The problem is that the storage
manager (Gasman) and the arbitrary integer package assume that the size
of a pointer and and an unsigned long integer are 32 bit. On the Alpha
machines however, they are 64 bit large. There is currently no fix for
that.

I have written a new storage manager that appears to work on the DEC
Alpha machines. This storage manager will be in GAP 4.1. We cannot make
any promises as to when this version will become available.

There is another approach that might be possible. DEC offers a migration
tool that can be used to migrate binaries from DECstations (with the MIPS
R3000 processor) to binaries for the DEC Alpha machines (with the new
Alpha processor). I dont know whether it would be possible to migrate
the GAP kernel this way, and in any case such a migrated kernel would run
slower than a kernel compiled on an Alpha. But it would be worth a try
and would certainly be better than to wait for GAP 4.1.

Martin.

-- .- .-. - .. -.  .-.. --- ...- . ...  .- -. -. .. -.- .-
Martin Sch"onert,   Martin.Schoenert@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE,  +49 241 804551
Lehrstuhl D f"ur Mathematik, Templergraben 64, RWTH, D 51 Aachen, Germany