Re: GNAT for Mac?

[shebs@cygnus.com (Stan Shebs)]

In article <3albc4$9g3@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

   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).

I believe it's still officially in place.  I will consider it ended
when Apple's name is removed from the "fight look and feel" section of
the GCC manual.  I just looked at a bit of the change history, and
that section has changed substantially in the past few months, as
shown by our CVS repository, although none of the changes are
documented in GCC's ChangeLog.  For instance, Xerox is no longer
mentioned by name, even though the previous justification for
boycotting it was that although its lawsuit had been thrown out,
"Xerox has not said anything to indicate it wouldn't try again".
(Perhaps I missed a recent announcement?)

   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!

This is all true, but from a practical point of view, maintaining
branches in parallel is very expensive and time-consuming.  It's very
easy for a casual change by an FSF maintainer to break a a port not
maintained by the FSF (it happened to me many times at Apple).  A
fully compatible native Mac port is more complex than for DOS or OS/2,
although it's probably simpler for Ada than for C (Mac C compilers
must support a number of exotic extensions to ANSI C).

   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.

By moi, to be exact. :-) There is also a version 2 port to MPW, and
there are versions that run under Unix emulators like MacMiNT, so you
*can* get versions that don't need MPW, although they are not yet
sufficient for production use.

   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 :-)

Amen to that!  We're neither a charity, nonprofit, nor government
agency, so you have to wave actual dollars, in sufficient numbers to
fund whatever work you'd like to see.

Note also that if you're waiting for someone *else* to fund the work,
and they're waiting for *you* to fund the work, nothing gets accomplished.

							Stan Shebs
							Cygnus Support
							shebs@cygnus.com