Re: GCC for Mac OS X (fwd)

[Darren Schreiber]

Thanks for that forward Ted.  As one of the Mac Fans here I'm particularly
interested in this kind of info.

Of course, I'm still not sure I understand the all the implications.  If
GCC for MacOS X becomes fully compliant with the standard, does that mean
that Swarm would easily (or reasonably easily) compile for it?

Thanks in advance...

        Darren


>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 15:34:31 -0800
From: Stan Shebs <address@hidden>
>To: address@hidden
>Subject: GCC for Mac OS X
>
>Hi all, some of you may know me from GDB, and a few with long memories
>may remember that I did a couple Mac ports of GNU a while back (those
>silly mpw-* files scattered everywhere are my fault).
>
>I've just started working for Apple's Mac OS X tools team.  This may come
>as a surprise, but Mac OS X is basically FreeBSD 3.2 with a GUI.  Not only
>that, but in a few months it will be shipping on every new Mac - so yes
>indeed, your grandmother will be running Unix!
>
>Anyway, my tasks here are twofold: 1) to reduce the divergence between
>Apple's GCC and FSF GCC, and 2) to help improve the compiler in various
>ways.  Apple has a half-dozen engineers working on GCC that have been
>quietly following along with the development trunk, but the set of
>patches is still pretty large.  I'll be looking at the local patches,
>and sending in those that seem worthwhile for the mainstream.  (Apple
>has a blanket assignment for GDB already, but I think we still need to
>do one for GCC.)
>
>At the same time, now that GCC is being used heavily by Apple's OS
>developers, as well as by 3rd parties busily porting to Mac OS X,
>a number of issues have cropped up.  While the team here is obligated
>to resolve them one way or another, ideally we'd like to do things in
>a way that will be of interest to the whole GCC community, and so I
>plan to be sending a lot of mail to this list (get your killfiles set
>up now :-) ), asking for ideas and suggestions.
>
>So far I'm aware of about four major areas that need attention:
>
>1. C++ support.  Apparently there have been a number of reports of
>C++ constructs allowed by other Mac compilers, but that fail with GCC.
>Some cases are just user error, others are compiler limitations.
>I'll report on these as specific cases come up.
>
>2. Objective C.  ObjC has not seen a lot of evolution lately, but
>it's still in use.
>
>3. PowerPC code quality.  Apple has more than a few bit-twiddling
>graphics engineers who pore over inner loops and such.  They need
>the compiler to generate faster code.  Exception handling and
>AltiVec support are two specific areas; for instance, Apple is
>using a big hairy patch from Motorola for AltiVec code gen, but
>from what I've seen of the patch so far, it seems problematic
>for mainstream GCC.
>
>4. Compiler turnaround.  Mac developers are used to the fast
>compile times offered by Metrowerks, and are dismayed by GCC's
>slowness.  Do we need precompiled headers?  Should file system
>probes be cached?  There are a lot of theories going around, but
>facts are in short supply.  But however it's accomplished, the
>compiler needs to go faster.
>
>I'm sure more issues will arise in the future, but these are
>the current biggies for which I'll be asking for guidance.
>Thanks for your attention, and looking forward to working with
>everybody on improving GCC!
>
>Stan Shebs
>address@hidden
>
>
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_____________________________________________

                 Darren Schreiber
                  Attorney at Law
                 Graduate Student
             Political Science, UCLA
                address@hidden
        http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~dschreib

                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
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   with "help" in the body of the message.