Re: State of Swarm on Mac OS X?

[W . Northcott]

> question before I dive in: what is the state of Swarm on Mac OS X? I've
....
> (1) Does someone out there have it running in a usable form?
No.

> (2) How far is it from being part of the standard distribution/a
> double-clickable .pkg/Fink package/something like that?

Eventually it should possible to package it as a framework .  A couple of 
months back, I tried to summarise the position as some tasks on the swarm 
site at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm/

In summary:
Xfree86 can be installed on MacOS X and all the required Swarm libraries 
(Tcl/Tk, BLT, hdf5 etc) built against that.  The current (August 2002) 
developer tools should be able to build the Swarm libraries with possibly 
one small patch related to  an alternative and faster method invocation 
syntax.

I have been too busy with teaching to do any work for some weeks. 
Allesandro Perrone (address@hidden) has reported that he can compile most 
if not all the Swarm libraries.

You might want to have a go yourself.

To use the Aqua GUI rather than X11 there are some more problems.  There 
is an Aqua version of Tcl/TK which is under active development and now 
quite usable.  However, it is version 8.4 and BLT will only compile 
against 8.3.x.

> (3) (I'm a Cocoa programmer almost exclusively.) Is there any way to 
throw
> a Cocoa UI on top of Swarm stuff, or does the GNU ObjC vs. Apple ObjC
> issue prevent that?

Scott Christley wrote a good summary of the problem on this list some 
weeks back.  Basically the GNU ObjC and Next/Apple Objc have a different 
message passing mechanism.  The compiler can be instructed to use either 
method with the -fgnu-runtime or -fnext-runtime flags.  The problem is 
that this flag acts on a per file basis.  so you can't compile a program 
which uses both methods.  The solution is to write a bit of C glue to 
allow passing messages using the method of choice on a per message basis.

Perhaps this would make a good project for a Computer Science student.<g>

Hope this helps.

Bill Northcott

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