Re: GCC for Mac OS X (fwd)

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "TB" == Theodore C Belding <address@hidden> writes:

TB> First, the fact that gcc is being ported to MacOS X,
TB> along with the fact that MacOS X will be "FreeBSD with a Mac GUI",
TB> means that eventually you will be able to run ObjC Swarm
TB> applications natively under MacOS X (FreeBSD is a free version of
TB> Unix, analogous to Linux, so almost everything you can do on Linux
TB> should also be possible on FreeBSD/MacOS X). 

The bad news is that Apple has a compiler fork from mainline GCC
sources.  They also have a completely independent Objective C runtime.
Swarm's phase splitting code, and probing machinery would need to be
ported to this other environment.  (I looked at a scheme to entirely
eliminate the phase splitting code, but that scheme turned out to be
flawed and would have required all kinds of interface changes.)  The
port should be doable but it won't be a priority for us until SDG
members make it one.

Of course, it isn't necessary to use Apple's runtime or compiler, but
not doing so would mean that InterfaceBuilder wouldn't work.
(InterfaceBuilder is a kind of visual programming tool.)

The good news is twofold: 1) there are engineers at Apple trying to
improve the situation by coordinating with the GCC folks, and 2) Apple
has assigned copyright on GDB changes, so there is at least no
artificial obstacle to an ObjC-equipped GDB.

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