From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5d819a12831be771 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: James E. Hopper Subject: Re: Building an Ada compiler Date: 1996/06/30 Message-ID: <4r4idi$egp@eri1.erinet.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 162851960 distribution: world references: <4r0u04$21b0@sat.ipp-garching.mpg.de> <4r4c6m$bec@eri1.erinet.com> content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 x-xxmessage-id: organization: Personal mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-06-30T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article Mark Eichin, eichin@cygnus.com writes: >If you've got at least one unix-gcc wizard and one mac-wizard, >(preferably in the same body :-) you can probably make a good estimate >of what it would take to get GNAT to use that gcc support (I don't >actually know if it is up-to-date in the current FSF release.) Then >the big challenge is the Ada Runtime; again, look at the example gnat >ones and figure out how/if yo can do that kind of thing under macos... I am a past master of the mac OS programming (i have made a fair amount of money doing contract programming for the mac), and i have spent the last couple of years working with unix, and having spent about 10 years working in Ada, and As the person who did most of the work on the MachTen port (with a LOT of help from the folks at NYU/ACT) and others) i think i qualify to address this ;-) I will say that this is far less easy than Tucker makes it out. Realize that if it were this easy it would have been done long ago. I happen to know that one of the people at cygnus has been working on porting gcc to MPW for a couple of years and he is still not happy enough with it to release it. An MPW version of GCC that is very old 2.3?? exists and a port of the current version is underway as i say (powermac only). Moving from an MPW IDE to something like code warrior is much more work as building gcc and Gnat is very dependent on GNU make which is fundamentally incomparable with how projects work in code warrior. i suppose one could do as Stan has done at cygnus and write a translator to translate between GNU make files and the code warrior project. i suspect its a bigger effort than one would believe givin how much work i know stan has put into his in his mpw translator and its still requires (last time i talked to him) some hand work. if the best you can do is MPW, one has to ask what is to be gained by it. you wold still need to buy MPW which is every bit as much as unmac line as MachTen. in fact MPW and machten are very similar IDE environments. The cost of MPW is similar to what the cost of MachTen will be come august/sept when the software development release for Ada is available. Machten still sits on the mac os, and i use mac tools like bbedit and code warrior to do things like editing, and source code control. we can develop double clickable macos applications, as well as unix CLI apps with macOS windowing support in place of x/motif. So how much more mac can you wish?? I do love the code warrior environment to but i KNOW how much more work it will be to move from what we have to this, and i don't want to wait another year to have a useful compiler, do you?? We have spent a couple of thousand man hours over the last year and a half to get the machten port working, if you have that kind of time to throw at it i would be delighted to see it done. I know how to use machten to build a stand alone gcc that can work with other IDE's like the GW AdaED environment or perhaps as a plug in to metrowerks but this gnat would not be able to build itself without much more work than i feel like throwing at it. but unless someone feels like funding this i am going to concentrate on making the Machten compile and tools as good as they can be. i see issues like moving it to another IDE as distractions of the fundamental issue of providing a useful compiler. I would also point out that a couple of Ada vendor who i have haunted over the last few years to do a mac port of their commercial compilers told me they are watching the machten port to see how many people use it as a gauge of the interest in Ada in the mac world. jim