The other day I was trying to build a large enterprise application with Sun Studio 9 C/C++ compilers and with profile feedback optimization. For some reason, iropt (code optimizer) failed with the error: compiler(iropt) error: heap_free: misaligned argument(0x666f2a3e). As a first step to see if this is a bug, I thought of installing SS9's backend patch 115983-04; but surprisingly the patch installer refused to install the patch. Even though it doesn't make any sense, I tried to install the patch 115983-01, before installing 115983-04, with no luck. Then I tried to install the packages, that are bundled with the patch, manually; even this attempt failed, as if there is no Sun Studio 9 compiler installed on the system.

Later I realized that I've installed RR (Revenue Release) version of Sun Studio 9, almost an year back. And since GA (General Availability) version was released some time after RR was released, I just want to give it a shot with the hope that this problem was fixed in GA bits. So, I 've uninstalled the RR version, and installed the GA copy that I downloaded from Sun Microsystems web site. The same serial# works for both RR & GA. This time I was able to install the patch 115983-04, without any issues; and iropt's error was gone too.

Moral of the story:
[Generic] Install the latest compilers and keep it up-to-date with all compiler patches from sunsolve.

[Specific to the current problem] Install GA copy of Sun Studio 9 compiler collection. If you have RR copy, you may not be able to patch it.

(Just for the records)
____________________
Technorati tags: Sun Studio | C | C++