Mac Port (was Re: [fpc-pascal]sparc port...)

[Jonas Maebe]

On vrijdag, augustus 24, 2001, at 11:05 , Full_Name wrote:

>> PowerPC (because I want FPC on my Mac)
>
> Yay Mac, yay Mac :-)
>
> Will you be supporting all PowerPC models? Some of us could only afford 
> second
> hand Performer 6100's ( £50, 601 processor, MacOS 8.0, 72mb RAM, 500mb 
> hdd, 2x
> CDRom), and so we would love a PowerPC compiler too. I have a couple of
> versions of Think Pascal, including the hard to find final official 
> release
> (not 4.5, 4.01 or something??) but as it's 68k, that's not really what 
> I'm
> after :-(

It's not very difficult to support all PowerPC models, since at the 
instruction level there's little difference (at least for "normal" 
programs, for OS'es there are significant differences for some things). 
Only on the G4 you have the extra AltiVec stuff, but that won't be 
immediately supported anyway.

> If you need testing, please call on me.

It'd be very nice if you could start testing the RTL support routines 
I've already wirtten for PowerPC (see in the PowerPC subdirectory of 
<ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/source/rtl.zip>). Simply throw the 
body of the code in a C assembler function and you should be able to 
test them.

> If you'll only be supporting one of the flavours of Linux on the mac, 
> please
> support the mkLinux, as nothing else runs on the 6100, with it's crappy
> hardware and PDS slot. I wish I had a PDS > NUBUS converter and a decent
> graphics card!! My apple monitor only does 640x480, and my APPLE > VGA
> converter will only work with my crappy main monitor that's heading for 
> the
> scrap heap asap (it has issues with working.. keeps flipping into 
> standby
> mode..)

I'm mainly interested in Darwin, since I use almost exclusively Mac OS X 
nowadays. Since Darwin was partly derived from MkLinux, it may  be not 
too difficult to support MkLinux as well. There's also a bunch of people 
who want to do a classic Mac OS port already. I definitely intend to 
support different calling conventions from the start (they're different 
for LinuxPPC and Mac OS, and Mac OS X is again slightly different I've 
heard, even though it's derived from the classic Mac OS's calling 
conventions)


Jonas