Hi,
This is a follow-up on Aaron's excellent posting but also a clarification
on the nature of Mac OS X.
>There is a version of poplog for powerPC running AIX, so I assume that
>if Mac OS X is largely unix-like then the incremental compiler
>facilities for PPC+AIX should already have broken the back of the
>porting job since the machine instructions (generated both by the
>run-time incremental compiler, and the build-time batch compiler) are
>the same?
Mac OS X is indeed a UNIX in the BSD family. The core of Mac OS X, i.e.
excluding the GUI level, is Darwin and open source. A good introduction
is provided here
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/faq.html
In particular
"note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences (such
as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible
as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform)."
This means that all the usual command-line tools, such as gcc and the
assembler are standard.
One early question would be whether the PPC+AIX assembler is compatible
with the Mac OS X.
>If the operating system is not sufficiently like unix or linux
>or if it does not use standard X window facilities, then a lot
>more work will be needed (e.g. the event handling, the external
>procedure call and external data interfaces, etc.).
From the viewpoint of a Poplog port, the only significant difference
between Mac OS X and, say PPC Linux, is that Mac OS X has its own
proprietary GUI. There are, however, a number of X servers knocking
around that could be used for the job. However a "deeper" port would
involve a proper integration with the GUI and the associated event
model.
If you want to write in Objective C or Java, the documentation for
application developers is fine. However, for writing at a lower level
the documentation is very hard to find. Apple have done a poor job in
this regard. So a deeper level of integration would present a challenge.
--
Steve
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