Re: FSF drops Apple boycott, opens gate for GNAT, etc.

[shebs@cygnus.com (Stan Shebs)]

In article <3h3hiv$e49@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

   From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
   Date: 5 Feb 1995 16:56:47 -0500

     "Actually, given the amount of Mac support I've seen in the Ada
      community, I can say the GNAT port will be out about 24 hours after
      the gcc port.  The essential question is: When will there be a
      current gcc port (with the expected tools)?

   THen put some of this enthusiasm to work doing the GCC port, it is not
   that much work. We have ported GCC to completely new architectures in
   a month. In this case, both for the 68K and the Power architectures,
   the main work is done. Doing a straightforward port to MPW can't be
   that difficult, especially since you can borrow some of the code from
   the old outdated version. I should think that it is no more than a
   couple of weeks work by someone familiar with MPW. A native port is
   more work to be sure, but still quite within reach.

Ho ho ho! Sorry Robert, you've exposed your ignorance of Macs and MPW.

Where shall we start?  The MPW scripting language, which is quite
different from any Unix scripting language?  The MPW make, which is
also quite different from Unix make? The lack of fork/exec, which the
GCC driver wants to use to run cpp, cc1, as, and ld?  And speaking of
as and ld, which ones were you expecting to use?  Did you know that
the MPW assembler requires *declarations* of function and variable
symbols *before* they're referenced, or that it will magically
transform global refs into a5-relative refs?  If you were thinking of
using gas and gld instead, did you know that BFD and some of its hairy
macros will cause MPW C to fail spectacularly?  Have you thought about
the Mac's lack of preemptive multitasking and what this implies if you
want to run any compiles in the background?

These problems can be (and have been) worked around, but doing it
correctly - and maintainably - is a lot more than a couple weeks work,
even for someone who's intimately familiar with GNU, Macs, and MPW.

							Stan Shebs
							Cygnus Support
							shebs@cygnus.com