OpenEuphoria

Re: non-x86 development

• Posted by David Cuny <dcuny at LANSET.COM> Jul 21, 2001
• 349 views

martin stachon wrote:

> I am not sure if coding for 68k architecture
> is a good idea. AFAIK, 68k is now not supported
> by Apple. (The new OSes require at least G3).

DOS isn't supported by Microsoft anymore, but I don't know that it's been a
serious deterrent to Euphoria.

> It is problem to port Eu to another Unix, so
> porting it to Mac would be a big problem.

I was under the impression that there were only two bits of
architecture-specific code in Euphoria:

1. Bits encoding the type are endian-specific.
2. Numbers are assumed to be 32 bits.

I would think that could be isolated with some #ifdefs. I would assume that
Robert uses sizeof() and other standard coding practices to insulate his
code.

> Translating the Eu code to other architecture
> would be difficult, because some parts of code
> are in ASM,

Are they? Even if Euphoria generates in-line assembly, you could still add
flags to suppress these optimizations on non x86 platforms. And we know that
Robert's had to port Euphoria to several compilers, so the code isn't
specific to a single compiler's features.

> and there are differences between the OSes -
> MacOS <9 have no STDIN / STDOUT - so you have
> to emulate console.

These are automatically provided by most Mac C libraries. You end up getting
something that looks like a DOS console on a 68K Mac pretty much for free
using Metrwerks, for example.

> And you will have to add all this Mac specific code
> to libraries - calling ROM routines (QuickDraw), calling
> OS, working with resources etc.

You have to do native calls under Linux and Windows as well.

> I looked at few pieces of code, and MacOS
> API seems more complicated to me than WIN32
> API. You will have to read the Mac Programming
> Bible. (very fat book)

I don't think the Mac API is *that* much more complicated than Windows.

> You may get to run some current generic
> Eu progs, (after modifications like using
> ':' instead of '\\', but creating GUI apps
> would be difficult.

No more difficult than on other platforms.

> I wouldn't do this. It requires a lot work.

I wouldn't make that assumption until seeing Robert's source. You could be
right, but at this point, it's all speculation. When I get my copy, I hope
to give it a whirl on an emulated 68K Mac.

-- David Cuny