Re: GNAT for Mac?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Laurent Gasser is spreading a common piece of misinformation when he 
incorrectly conjectures that the lack of a MAC port of GCC (and hence
GNAT) is due to the LPF boycott of Apple (which is in any case, as far
as I know, ended).

The one and only reason that there is no version of GCC for GNAT is that
no one has done the port. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing
this port [were the boycott in place, the port would not be included
in the standard FSF distribution, but so what, lots of important ports
of GCC, including for example the popular EMX port for OS/2) are not
distributed by FSF. Of course it's nice to have everything in the main
distribution, but you can't in any case distribute what doesn't exist, 
and in this case it is more to the point to worry about how to get the
port to exist, than to worry about how it is distributed when it does
exist!

THe history is that there was a GCC version 1 port for the MAC, done I
think by someone at Apple. But this port ran under MPW, so it was of
limited use.

What is needed is a native port of GCC 2.6.2. As I noted in a previous
message, I believe there is some activity at Cygnus. If you want a port
of GCC there are three things you can do:

  1)  do it yourself, the most useful, but the most difficult alternative
  2)  let the folks at Apple know you really want a port
  3)  let the folks at Cygnus (gumby@cygnus.com) know that you really 
	want a port.

Note that Cygnus is interested in selling support for GCC, so your 
interest is more interesting to them if you are need to use MAC/GCC 
or MAC/GNAT for serious work requiring commercial support :-)