Re: Please, Not MachTen! (Was: learning Ada on a Mac)

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

Spencer Smith says:

>I was pleased to see that GNAT was available on the Mac platform. I
was >tickled pink! I quickly followed the link, and. . . >. . .was
very disappointed. The fact that the GNAT Ada compiler was >available
was heartening, but that it needs MachTen to run in is not. I >have
installed and experimented with MachTen, and as an environment for
>developing applications and tools, it is a bear. I had the *worst*
time, >so bad that I finally gave up my dream of dual-booting a Mac
with Unix.


I have used unix on sun, sgi, HP, and linux and of all of them MachTen
is easily the nicest environment if you want a mac style interface
(thought sgi is also VERY nice).  I suspect that if you want a "pure"
unix environment you might be a bit dissapointed as emacs has some
problems on it (though vi, nedit others work fine), and a few other
unix tools are not available.  This is rapidly changing for the better. 
Though for developing Ada programs i have not yet found any missing
that i care about.  more importantly we are using machten only as a
shell for developing Mac Code which is a completely different beast.
We use Mac Text Editors, mac debuggers, Mac CM tools etc with machten
being used only to run the compiler and linker.  we do have the choice
of building apps either as straight unix (including x amd motif), unix
apps with macOS GUI, or standalone Mac OS applications. MKLinux has NO
access to the mac toolbox so it can do nothing except the first of
these three.  if all you want is a hard core unix environment as
spencer says then mklinux is for you!  If you want an environment to
do more than MachTen is great!  It has had a few problems in that it
does not have protected memory, and it did not have a native file
system (that made its unix apps slower) but both of these are close
to being available and will make MachTen even more useful. Of course i
am talking about the powermac version.  the 68k version is much more
of a complete unix as it has full memory protection, etc, but it does
not allow the user to develop mac OS apps as prt of it.


>The OSF/Apple port of MkLinux is out, and I'm using it/ running
>it/cursing it/loving it. It has a *lot* of potential. I haven't tried
to >install GNAT within the MkLinux environment, has anyone else given
it a >try? >However, that is still developing Unix apps on a
fundamentally Unix >platform, regardless of the cute logos imbedded on
the case of the CPU. >I'm still in search of an Ada95 compiler for the
Mac platform.

A MKLinux compiler is NOT it!  It will only allow you to develop unix
only applications!  If what you want is a Mac Ada compile then why do
you care what machten environment is like as we rarely spend much time
in it to develop mac apps.  its just a window where we run gnatmake,
then switch back to the mac!


jim hopper