Re: Swarm on Mac OS X? Anybody?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "PM" == Philip Mötteli <address@hidden> writes:

PM> Has anybody started to port Swarm to MOSX?

To review, the main two problems to resolve are:

   1) Apple's GCC is broken and normal unbroken GCC doesn't know about
      Darwin's Mach-O assembler and linker `features'.  Apple has
      given lots of lip service to integrating with the mainline GCC
      sources, but there has yet been no evidence of progress. 

      I will be surprised if there are fixes in the MacOS X release
      because there as yet hasn't been much activity in the Apple GCC
      CVS tree, nor substantive discussion of patches on the Darwin
      mailing list.  With March coming up soon, my guess is that  
      there will be no time move from the current situation to something
      tested that can be put on a CD-ROM (yet another extra delay).

      I will also be surprised if they manage to get anything into GCC 3.0
      because, in the Real sources, the PPC backend code has been
      changing a lot for structural reaons for AIX in the backend, and there
      has been no public participation in discussion from Apple engineers on
      the matter of PPC stabilization on the GCC mailing list.

      As I've mentioned before, I'm so disgusted by what I see as
      Apple/NeXT's longstanding indifference to their developer
      community and pointless infrastructure weirdness, that I'm not
      willing to help fix any more of the problems they have created.

      Of course, I'm perfectly willing to install workarounds in Swarm
      from individuals that want to deal with it in an end-to-end kind
      of way.  I hope you have fun.

   2) Swarm uses Tk/BLT for graphics, so some kind of port of those
      libraries is needed, one that can work in a the GCC compiler environment.
 
      This issue can be avoided if you set up a X11 server.

A related issue for fans of the WebObjects development tools
(e.g. InterfaceBuilder) is that Swarm uses the GNU Objective C runtime
and Apple has their own from back in the NeXT days.

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