Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: GCL on Cygwin for Axiom

[root]

> Damn. I am sorry to hear that Schelter is not still
> available. I guess the Internet hasn't quite progressed to
> that stage yet... And it's a reminder to me that there is
> some urgency in this project to document Axiom and make it
> available. <frown>

Actually Bill's death is what set me off to try to open
source Axiom. He and I worked together on AKCL (pre-GCL)
and I was impressed with him.

As to the urgency question, yeah, I'm gettin' old and the males 
in my clan die young. I'm writing as fast as I can :-)

> What I meant to write was GCL (Schelter's lisp), not GCC -
> It was late and I was frustrated. I am more awake not.

grin. either you used a relatively recent form of negation
(trailing not) or you had a typo and meant now. either way
it was funny.

> Yes, GCC runs just fine on Cygwin for me but I do not have
> a running version of GCL. In comparison to CCL, GCL is a
> monster! Nearly everything I have tried to do in order to
> make a running version of GCL under cygwin has failed with
> obviously incorrect and untested code C coding. Getting CCL
> to run was a piece of cake compared to this!

CCL is supposed to be cross-platform by design and I believe
was ported to Cygwin before. GCL is much more platform specific
and depends on the GCC environment for portability. I'll raise
the priority of getting CCL running from the Makefiles so you
can continue to contribute. 

> Does your offer to help extend to GCL? I have so many
> problems and have tried so many things that it is a bit
> hard to know where to start asking questions. But ...

sure. I'll help any way I can.

> 1) First things: The version 2.4.1 of GCL that is in your
> CVS is a bit out of date. The current version is 2.4.3.
> And even the version of GMP (GNU math package) that is
> in 2.4.3 is quite out of date. The most recent version
> of GMP is 4.1

The point of the zips directory is to keep a version that 
is known to work. Things die of code-rot (that is, somebody
"upgrades" their subsystem, like C++ did, and everybody downstream
is broken). I wanted to make sure there was at least a working
version available. I'll download and test 2.4.3 before I put
it in the zips.

As for the GMP connection you should tweak 
Camm Maguire <address@hidden> about it.

> 2) Via the web, I found that it is known that version 2.4.1
> of GCL is missing some critical files for the Cywin build,
> specifically 'unexnt.c'. So after several more failed
> attempts witn 2.4.1, I download 2.4.3 and tried to compile
> it. unexnt.c is there, but there are a whole host of other
> problems, many of which seem to relate to GMP. So I
> downloaded 4.1 of GMP. That built just fine on it's own
> and after some fiddling I finally got GCL to link with it.
> After alot of fixing other small things, I finally got to
> the final load step for GCL only to have the the loader
> blow up with a segment fault and stack dump ... jeez.

Read the GMP pamphlet files. I'm sure they explain what they
are trying to do well enough to fix it :-) Methinks you're
on the foreskin of technology here. Try restoring the clean
2.4.3 version, run a make and send me the output trace. I'll
look at it and hopefuly have something insightful to say.

> 3) There is a "pre-release" version of GCL posted at the
> Savannah site which is supposed into compile into native
> Window's application with the mingw32 version of GCC.
> Perhaps that is where I will try to go next.

mingw32? Don't know what that is.

> 4) But first a few more attempts. I am in the middle of
> getting the missing unexnt.c file from the newest version
> of GCL and using it with the older version. I will let you
> know how far this one goes.

good luck. Let me know if I can help. Send console traces.
I'm pushing on the next layer of the system but I'll give
some thought to the CCL issue.

Tim