Libfast.a unavailable in SPARC 64-bit mode?

Question

With Studio 11 on SPARC (Sun C 5.8 Patch 121015-02 2006/03/29) when compiling a "Hello, world" program like this:
$ cc -xarch=generic64 -lfast hello.c
I get:
ld: fatal: library -lfast: not found
ld: fatal: File processing errors. No output written to a.out
There is no libfast.a in prod/lib/v9, only in prod/lib.
I can't see any reason -lfast can't be used in 64-bit mode. I searched and can't come up with anything The documentation at http://docs.sun.com/source/819-3688/perf.app.html.
Am I missing this restriction somewhere in the documentation?

Answer 1

libfast, a very old library, was designed in a way that did not scale to 64-bit architectures. A v9 version might have to be called "libslow". :-)
In principle, the library could be redesigned to work with 64-bit architectures, but there has been little or no customer demand for it. In addition, libfast is not MT-safe, and a new version should be designed to be MT-safe. Then we have to ask, with multiple versions of malloc already available on Solaris, why do we need yet another version?
We continue to ship the 32-bit SPARC version to accomodate makefiles and build scripts that used libfast. On other platforms, simply omit -lfast from link commands, or use one of the alternative versions of malloc that come with Solaris.
Run "man malloc" to find pointers to other allocator libraries.