Re: Is GNUstep really cross platform?

[Andrew Pinski]

On Dec 5, 2003, at 00:01, John Davidorff Pell wrote:

> On Dec 4, 2003, at 11:22 PM, Andrew Pinski wrote:
>
> > Also you info about libffi is not really correct, the source in GCC 
> > do work, just not the ones
> > in any released versions (read 3.4).
>
> Last time I tried (2-3 weeks ago) I built from FSF's GCC CVS HEAD and 
> from the released apple sources, neither worked.

I should work, I compile all the time (by compiling with gcj, where it 
is needed also).

> > Also GDB (I think 6.0 that is) now supports Objective-C without 
> > downloading a patch.
>
> Because it was fixed up and committed by apple, for inclusion in their 
> GDB. i did not advocate patching it in my HOWTO, I pointed out that it 
> is already done. I am glad to hear that it has been committed to 
> mainline.

If you mean the mainline as FSF's mainline yes then it was included 
almost for six months now.

> > We (GNUStep but I am not really part of this we) know (and so does 
> > GCC for that fact,
> > I am working on it) that GNU's libobjc is hard to compile on Darwin 
> > (aka Mac OS X).
>
> GNU's libobjc is only hard to compile because it has been turned off 
> in the build of gcc. Build it separately and it works fine "out of the 
> box". The only issue is a flag in autoconf, and a few missing files 
> that configure/make need (like mkinstldirs.sh, etc) which are in the 
> gcc directory.

As I said I am working on getting this fixed for 3.4 and getting it so 
both runtimes
work together, even later down the road getting them merged.

> > Also the reason why GNUStep Base does not work with NeXT (Apple)'s 
> > runtime, it was made
> > as a replacement on other platforms not on the NeXT (or Apple).
>
> Exactly, so it should be compatible.

Why, GNU's runtime is different than NeXT's runtime (they are not 
compatiable) and
they are not part of the OpenStep at all.

> > I think you should read some history about GNU's Objective-C and 
> > GNUStep to see why
> > they did this (also GNUStep is an implementation of the OpenStep 
> > specs and not Cocoa
> > which has extensions upon the OpenStep specs).
>
> I have read quite a bit about it, actually, and i understand almost 
> all of this. Cocoa is the latest edition of what was once the OpenStep 
> API. I can compile code written for OpenStep in cocoa, but I cannot 
> compile code from GNUstep in cocoa. Why not? Isn't GNUstep supposed to 
> be an OpenStep implementation?

No because Cocoa is not the latest edition of the OpenStep API (the API 
was documented
by Sun and NeXT and the API was called OpenStep, NeXT's implementation 
was called OPENSTEP).
Cocoa is more like Apple's evaluation of their code and they did not 
care to still with the
standard at all.


> Also, I cannot compile code from cocoa in either OpenStep or GNUstep, 
> which makes it difficult to write cross-platform code without GNUstep 
> on my box!

Why get another Mac and install GNU/Linux or any other *BSD on it and 
use that to test your code.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski