I tried building 21.0-b57 on a Sparcstation 4 running SunOS 5.5.1
There is apparently no check in the configure script for "ptrdiff_t".
This type is defined in /usr/include/stddef.h, but this header file
is not getting included anywhere, and the compilation bombs out.
Manually sticking "#define ptrdiff_t int" into config.h made it possible
to compile XEmacs on this platform.
SunOS spooky 5.5.1 Generic_103640-08 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-4
gcc --version
2.8.1