At 11:22 PM -0800 1/21/02, John M McIntosh wrote:
>>Is the FFI plugin for OS X available somewhere? I saw a message 
>>from John McIntosh saying he'd built one, but I don't see it 
>>anywhere I know to look.
>>
>>In the absence of a prebuilt FFI plugin, does anyone know how to 
>>build this plugin using Project Builder? Yesterday I managed to 
>>build a functional VM under Project Builder (thanks to all who 
>>contributed to making this relatively easy and documenting it!) but 
>>the FFI plugin has code that seems specific to (I'm guessing) 
>>CodeWarrior.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>-Martin
>
>I think the issue was how about one for Carbon.
>
>However the issue now is what about building one for Project Builder.

For right now, I'll take any FFI plugin that will run under OS X. 
We're proceeding with the Flying Karamazov Brothers' project, and 
deploying my Squeak app on OS X is a possibility. I need to come up 
with the basic feasibility of running my video input drivers (which 
use FFI, at least for now)  on OS X ASAP.

>
>Alas I've not built one. But mmm since you've some interest would 
>you like to build one? Take a look at the mpeglib bundle to see how 
>I build a bundle to be used by Squeak VM 3.2.1, that was easy.

This does look like a good project for me, but it does go into some 
areas I'm not familiar with so it would take me a while. The fact 
that I might learn something in doing a project doesn't normally make 
me reluctant to take it on (quite the opposite) but I'm just in a 
hurry right now.

I did try to build it last night. I ran into similar problems that I 
ran into trying to build FFI under MPW. It hangs up on FFI's use of 
the "asm" keyword, which I believe was not supported under MPW's MrC 
compiler and seems to be present but different in GCC. I'm 
investigating further, but would rather get a prebuilt one to use for 
now and pursue this question later.

>
>Also note that Andreas actually wrote the powerpc FFI, strange as 
>that might seem. Here we think he only knows intel stuff, but wait 
>didn't MS give us WinNT on the powerpc at some point so I guess it's 
>ok he also knows ppc assembler.
>
>Actually I bet you really should look at the unix ffi stuff because 
>after all this *is* a BSD unix system you are fiddling with.

I did look at the Unix FFI, but found that it relied on yet another 
external library and didn't dig deeper there.



This also brings up a general philosophical question about OS X 
support: Do we as a general rule want to support Project Builder, or 
would it make more sense to support gnumake instead? OS X comes with 
gnumake, and given the number of platforms that gnumake is available 
for it seems like we might be better able to maintain current 
makefiles (or to do automatic generation of makefiles) for multiple 
platforms if we used gnumake for all the platforms for which it is 
available.

-Martin