[Swarm-Support] Swarm build on MacOS Intel

[Bill Northcott]

I have not yet attempted to build Swarm on an Intel Mac.  I do have  
access to a couple of Intel machines but not easily.

There are a number of issues:
1.  The current binaries are PPC only.  By default the gcc on the  
Intel Mac will build x86 code which will not link with the ppc  
library.  This is probably your problem.  You may be able to get  
around this using the '-arch ppc' compiler flag, but see 2 below.

2.  If you try to build yourself, you will need Tcl/Tk and BLT.  The  
binary libraries on the swarm site are PPC and I doubt the X windows  
libraries on an Intel Mac are fat.  So they will not be able to link  
at runtime. (Unless Rosetta does something incredibly clever).

3.  If you try to build Tcl/Tk BLT yourself, there are some issues  
you will need to overcome.  MacOS X 10.4.x Tiger comes with both Tcl  
and Tk frameworks.  The Tcl is OK but the Tk is built against Carbon  
graphics not X-11.  BLT2.4z must have X-11 Tk.  Using Tk sources from  
Sourceforge, it is not too hard to build an X-11 Tk as a framework  
and add BLT into it.  If you do all that, you should be able to build  
Swarm.

So far I have held off working on this because of two other promising  
approaches:
a.  The BLT developer has been working on version 3 which includes  
MacOS X code.  The current code in the BLT sourceforge cvs won't  
build because the MacOS X build files are out of date.  I spent a  
couple of hours on this last week but it is too broken to fix  
quickly.  So I have been hanging off waiting for some progress.  As  
explained above it is going to be non-trivial to do an Intel build  
with BLT2.4z and I did not want to waste time on it, if a much better  
solution is in the offing.

b. Some of the Swarm developers have been working on getting Swarm  
away from Tcl/Tk/BLT and onto a GNUstep interface.  The GNUstep  
AppKit is mainly compatible with the OS X one so it should be easy  
and much better to get this to work native on MacOS X Cocoa.

Sorry I can't be more encouraging, but if you want to have a try at  
this, contact me off the list.

Bill Northcott

On 24/05/2006, at 8:11 AM, Carson Baker wrote:

> Hi Bill,
>
> I've been trying to build Swarm on my MacBook Pro and am having some
> troubles. It looks like the libs you packaged don't work with intel  
> chips.
> That is, I get arch errors when trying to link to it when building the
> Santa Fe artificial stock market.
>
> So I tried building the swarm libs from the 2.2 src but I had some  
> errors
> with ./configure. It was having trouble finding Tcl. I pointed it  
> in the
> right direction using the --with-tclscriptdir but then it wanted  
> another
> file in the  same directory that I found hiding in another.. long  
> story
> short, that didn't work. I imagine you've seen this problem though,  
> since
> evidently you managed to overcome it when building your package.
>
> Any suggestions here?
>
> Cheers,
> Carson