Re: Writing a Mac Ada compiler

[evans@evans.pgh.pa.us (Arthur Evans Jr)]

Commenting on my suggestion that a GCC port to the Mac might use
Metrowerks, vladimir@speedy.intrepid.com (Vladimir Vukicevic) wrote:

> You can indeed add new 'translators' to metrowerks, much like you can
> with gcc. However, the task of ripping out gnat from its gcc roots and
> performing surgery to get the piece to fit into metrowerks would be
> -significantly- harder than porting gcc. Metrowerks provides
> information on how to write new translators; however, there is
> virtually no chance that the tree structure they use is semi-
> compatible with gcc; they might not even use this type of
> 'translating'.

Interesting.

An important early decision to make in planning a GCC port to MPW would
be whether to use the MPW linker or GCC's.  My guess, based on zero
knowledge, is that GCC's linker is enough different from MPW's that it
would require performing major surgery on GCC to use MPW's format.  But,
nothing keeps you from using your own linker under MPW.  Since GCC runs
on NeXT hardware, 680x0 code generators must exist.  I would think that
the major task here, as in any port to a non-Unix target, would be
changing OS calls from Unix (or whatever) to Mac OS.  And I certainly
don't call that a trivial task.

How does this discussion differ from the situation under Metrowerks?
What "tree" is it that Vladimir refers to?

Art Evans

Arthur Evans Jr, PhD        Phone: 412-963-0839
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