Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 11:40:13 -0700 From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@anobject.com> To: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee> Cc: Mark Peek <mark@whistle.com>, freebsd-ppc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the abi Message-ID: <200006081840.LAA45708@server.manson.net>
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Begin forwarded message:
> But - what do they use? Esp. as I haven't been able to connect to the
> darwin site during ~ a week now (and that's why it's not listed). It is
> probably sysv4, though.
Darwin uses Mach-O (the Mach object format). I was going to mention this
last night as kind of a joke option, but I guess it's a good thing I
didn't, since it looks like not many people on the list would have gotten
the joke. :)
I'm a big MacOS X supporter right now but I don't think that Mach-O's a
very good choice, at least since so far I haven't been able to find ANY
documentation about the format, besides Apple's source code mods to GCC and
binutils, and their "libmacho", which I don't consider sufficient to base
the future of FreeBSD/ppc on. For all I know, it might be a pretty cool
format, but unless someone on this list has a better idea where to go to
find a solid spec for this format, I don't think we should consider it. It
looks like it's just too different.
Besides, we wouldn't be able to directly take advantage of Apple's
modified GCC and binutils anyway, because we'd have to keep the Mach-O
changes while backing out or disabling all of the custom NeXT mods to do
things like search /System/Library/*.framework/Headers/ for headers and
search /System/Library/{FrameworkName}.framework/{FrameworkName} for shared
libs. Also, it's not like their modded GCC is 100% solid yet, as I was
able to trip up the C++ compiler in MacOS X with a simple (17-line) test
program that gave "Can't emit reloc {- symbol "L1$pb"} @ file address 164"
errors. I didn't look into this very far, but my theory is that some patch
for better Objective-C support broke something the compiler's doing for
C++. Which reminds me: if you want REALLY good Obj-C support as a goal
for FreeBSD/ppc, then maybe the Apple toolchain is the way to go. :)
Still, even for that, I don't think they'll be open-sourcing all of their
tools.. they still have some proprietary pieces to their ObjC runtime that
I don't think are ever going to make it into Darwin.
For FreeBSD/ppc, I vote for whatever Linux/ppc uses (SVR4, I believe).
Not only is this going to provide the most solid (and relevant to our
needs) toolchain, but it makes Linux ABI emulation in the kernel a little
easier.
-Jake
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