Re: Is GNUstep really cross platform?

[John Davidorff Pell]

On Dec 4, 2003, at 11:22 PM, Andrew Pinski wrote:

> Also you info about libffi is not really correct, the source in GCC do 
> work, just not the ones
> in any released versions (read 3.4).

Last time I tried (2-3 weeks ago) I built from FSF's GCC CVS HEAD and 
from the released apple sources, neither worked.

> Also GDB (I think 6.0 that is) now supports Objective-C without 
> downloading a patch.

Because it was fixed up and committed by apple, for inclusion in their 
GDB. i did not advocate patching it in my HOWTO, I pointed out that it 
is already done. I am glad to hear that it has been committed to 
mainline.

> We (GNUStep but I am not really part of this we) know (and so does GCC 
> for that fact,
> I am working on it) that GNU's libobjc is hard to compile on Darwin 
> (aka Mac OS X).

GNU's libobjc is only hard to compile because it has been turned off in 
the build of gcc. Build it separately and it works fine "out of the 
box". The only issue is a flag in autoconf, and a few missing files 
that configure/make need (like mkinstldirs.sh, etc) which are in the 
gcc directory.

> Also the reason why GNUStep Base does not work with NeXT (Apple)'s 
> runtime, it was made
> as a replacement on other platforms not on the NeXT (or Apple).

Exactly, so it should be compatible.

> I think you should read some history about GNU's Objective-C and 
> GNUStep to see why
> they did this (also GNUStep is an implementation of the OpenStep specs 
> and not Cocoa
> which has extensions upon the OpenStep specs).

I have read quite a bit about it, actually, and i understand almost all 
of this. Cocoa is the latest edition of what was once the OpenStep API. 
I can compile code written for OpenStep in cocoa, but I cannot compile 
code from GNUstep in cocoa. Why not? Isn't GNUstep supposed to be an 
OpenStep implementation?

Also, I cannot compile code from cocoa in either OpenStep or GNUstep, 
which makes it difficult to write cross-platform code without GNUstep 
on my box!

JP





--
Blood is thicker than water... and much tastier.

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