Re: Gnat on MkLinux (on Macs)?

[James E. Hopper <jhopper@erinet.com>]

In article <4p2j59$eqb@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> Dale Stanbrough,
dale@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU writes:
>A little while back someone posted some info on the Gnat port
>to the PowerMacs running MkLinux, which i have subsequently 
>lost :-(.  Can anyone point me to some info on this?
>
>Thanks,
>
Dale,

i think you are refering to our port to machten from tenon on the mac.  
MkLinux on the mac totally takes over the machine and as such you might
as well have a pc or a unix box as it has NO toolbox access.  Machten 
on the other hand runs beside macos and you can use mac tools to work
with it.  for instance i typically run bbedit to edit my unix files. 

in addition our ported compiler (3.04 out any day now) has a preliminary 
binding to the mac toolbox running and we are generating apps both
double clickable and unix apps with standard mac interface (thanks to
Tom Quiggle at SGI for running the mac universal headers through his
bindings generator). This is not to say that John Matthews who has been
working on these bindings has not done a lot of hand work to make them
work as seamlessly as they do. 

we have gotten the powermac versions compile speed up to where its fairly
competitive with the pc version on the pentium.  there are some
bottlenecks
on older powermacs but on the newer machines with fast scsi drives its 
quite pleasent (its still very reasonable even on older powermacs its just
better on newer machines).  for instance i can build the booch components
that David
Weller has on his web page in 1.5 minutes, hello world is about 15 seconds
for compile, bind, link time, the hello program in gnat examples is much
less even than this. This is much more encouraging that in previous
versions we have worked on.  An interesting compatability note. i download
the x bindings from the intermetrics site and they compile and run their
demos
without a hitch (build time about 15 minutes).  I have a beta of the new
mac
open GL libraries and ada bindings are on their way from the developers
of this
so we should also soon be able to support open GL work on the mac as well.

yes you need Machten, but no matter what development system you use on
the mac
you need a shell system.  something like mpw, or the metrowerks ide. 
machten
is a very nice unix shell and makes working with gnat very convenient.

best jim

jim hopper

note my gnat work is a private project (not part of my SAIC work) in
cooperation with 

	McKee Consulting
	Ada Core Technologies
	Tenon
	Art Evans
	Mike Feldman
	John Matthews
	Jim Hopper
	
	see our web page at http://gnat-mac.com/macada/ for details
	3.03 is at the ftp site for both ppc and 68k macs.