Re: [MacPerl] GNU GCC and G++

[Georges Martin <georges.martin@deboeck.be>]

I looked at the MPW-Dev archives and found two messages from Stan Shebs 
about GNU for Mac :

- one about gcc :

>   Date: Fri, 22 May 98 20:59:36 +0200
>   From: Gilles Depeyrot <Gilles.Depeyrot@wanadoo.fr>
>
>   I would like to know what the status of the GNU tools
>   under MPW is.
>
>   I'm quite used to compiling/installing the whole set
>   of tools (binutils, gcc, flex, bison, ...) on Unix
>   and Windows platforms but have never done it on the
>   Mac.
>
>   I looked in the GNU distributions and MPW does not seem
>   to be actively supported. 
>
>That's right.  I believe I spent more of my personal hours on GNU for
>MPW than anyone else on the planet, but in the end it was not a
>particularly valuable use of my time, since the number of MPW
>programmers was never large, and the number that even had a use for
>any of the GNU tools was a small percentage of that; the MPW GNU tools
>are used by only a few people anymore.  For most Mac programmers, CW
>or MPW alone provides a "good enough" environment, so you'd have to
>have a compelling reason to add the GNU versions.
>
>To make things worse, MPW is sufficiently different from Unix that the
>GNU ports are more complicated and need additional maintenance.
>
>You can look on ftp.cygnus.com, pub/mac, for various ports that I've
>done, both for 68k and PowerMacs, plus some other ports I've found
>useful.  There are additional ports of minor tools as well, wandering
>around the net, usually available as binaries so you don't have to
>rebuild.
>
>							Stan Shebs
>							shebs@cygnus.com
>
>(To put things in perspective, Cygnus' gnu-win32 web page, describing
>its port of GNU tools to Windows, averages some 60,000 hits per week...)

- and one about egcs :

>   Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 22:19:16 -0500
>   From: manuel veloso <veloso@pobox.com>
>
>   I just pulled the egcs 1.02 distribution, and it seems to have MPW support
>   (mpw-README, etc, like the old gcc 2.3x dist). Does it work? Is it for
>   real? I can't tell, since I never was able to build 2.3x with MPW, and 
>egcs
>   is source-only. If it is, I'll put up a how-to & dist page for binaries 
>(as
>   soon as I can figure out this mci web-hosting stuff).
>
>Your message prompted me to clean up Cygnus' Mac ftp site.
>ftp.cygnus.com's pub/mac now has the m68k and powerpc tools in
>subdirectories, the latest being a native PowerMac compiler,
>assembler, etc from December 1996.  (Cygnus' Mac business dried up
>about then, I haven't done any work on MPW GCC since.  Sic transit...)
>
>The PowerMac compiler builds with either itself or MW C.  I think
>I tried MrC at one point, but don't remember how it went.
>
>The set of MPW changes in the versions on the ftp site did not go into
>egcs, because there was nobody maintaining them.  The EGCS team is
>willing to incorporate MPW support if someone volunteers to adapt the
>old changes to the current code, since there's no one on the team with
>enough Mac/MPW knowledge to do it themselves.
>
>   It'd be nice to have gcc, since even the gcc 1.4x 68k version stomped on
>   all the other mac 68k compilers when it came to code quality. If the PPC
>   differential's just as good, well...
>
>At one point PowerPC GCC w/haifa scheduler did better than anyone else
>on a number of benchmarks, but that was in 1996.  Additional
>optimizations have been added to both GCC and MrC since then, so we'd
>need a new set of benchmark runs to see where things stand now.
>
>							Stan Shebs
>							Cygnus Solutions
>							shebs@cygnus.com

Anyway, there are GNU tools available for the Mac... it's just that 
they're not free :-)

Tenon Intersystems (<http://www.tenon.com/>) has two interesting product :

- MachTen is a complete UNIX environment running _under_ MacOS with 
networking, X-Windows, GNU development tools,...

- CodeBuilder <http://www.tenon.com:81/products/codebuilder/description/> 
is a stripped-down version of MachTen aimed at development. 

And they just cut down the price of MachTen...

Georges Martin

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