Re: What's all this about Swarm modifying the runtime?

[Perrone Alessandro]

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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