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Re: What's all this about Swarm modifying the runtime?
From: |
Perrone Alessandro |
Subject: |
Re: What's all this about Swarm modifying the runtime? |
Date: |
Mon, 30 Sep 2002 15:26:14 +0200 |
Hi
I don't even really know what "runtime" means, so take this with a
grain of salt.
The Next-runtime has been coded in Assembler, so it is faster than
the gnu-runtime.
It is not compatible, due to the fact that it has been coded in a
period in which there was not "love" between Apple (Next) and Gnu.
Does Swarm really use a different runtime?
Yes. I used, longitme ago, when the first versions of Unix-like were
born on Macintosh platform (Machten ppc), to compile swarm, a version
of objc modified from gcc (POC, portable objective-C compiler), and
after a couple of weeks of hard work, with the help of the
Poc-programmer, I had a minimal version of Swarm 1.4.1. I remember
that the problems were in some objc-gnu code, that the POC programmer
helped me to convert.
Swarm can be built with the stock gcc. There is an optional patch
we make to gcc to allow method functions, but it is not necessary.
I suspect that since gcc 3.2 has many optimizations incorporated
from the Apple research team (they claim messaging is now orders of
magnitudes faster) perhaps we don't even benefit from that one
little gcc patch.
You can compile gcc 3.2 without problems (and apple patch) in OsX.
If you get a gcc snapshot on or after 2002-09-09 (not 3.2, but
rather updates that come after it), you can build Swarm if you apply
3 small patches to Swarm itself. (I can give you those patches.)
Can you give me those patches? Are those of swarm-hackers-admin?
Doesn't that mean we are using the GNU runtime?
In my opinion, the answer is yes.
Actually I am trying to hack the gcc code merging the
powerpc-netbsd-gcc with darwin-powerpc-gcc, since the netbsd has not
the Next-objc inside him, while Darwin has netbsd code inside him.
Regards.
ALEX
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