Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 17:29:34 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Producing non-GPLed tools for FreeBSD Message-ID: <4.1.19981019171423.0673f240@mail.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <199810192227.PAA19542@usr07.primenet.com> References: <199810190637.XAA16847@dingo.cdrom.com>
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At 10:27 PM 10/19/98 +0000, Terry Lambert wrote: >See also "man a.out". There's a fair amount of stuff there, but I can see many places where it might be open to interpretation. Would have to experiment to see how boundary conditions, etc. fleshed out. >No need to really rehash this here; the statement misses the distinction >between "use" and "utilize". You can "utilize" GPL'ed code all you >want. I understand the distinction. What I don't want to do, however, is DEPEND on GPLed code. >The main issue is the assmebler. For a compiler that can produce >ELF code, and which is under a BSD-style license, do a net search on >"TenDRA". I have; it's an interesting idea.. The problems that I see are that their attempt to formalize an intermediate language for the abstract syntax tree seems only to have been applied to C and C++. It's unclear how well it works for arbitrary languages. For example, as best I can tell, it only supports C-style null-terminated strings; it doesn't seem to support counted strings as a low-level construct. The instructions for porting TenDRA imply that it must be bootstrapped using GCC; it does not appear that it can bootstrap itself. Finally, it looks as if it uses as(1) and ld(1) on the target system rather than implementing them itself. So, when you get down to the assembly and object code levels, you're back in GNU territory. I'd like to go right down to the bare metal. To do this, I'll need to learn how libraries are indexed, perhaps creating an index of them on the fly. And I'd probably need to make a header file converter. the C ones (.h) won't do much good for other languages.... --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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