[M3devel] nt386gnu is posix or win32?

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 11:08:57PM +0000, Jay wrote:
> I'm going to be rude and just throw this out there at a time when I probably can't discuss it or yet have enough data/diffs to matter.
> 
> However, in building NT386GNU -- I can build libm3 and m3core -- the question arises as to if this target is "win32" or "posix'.
> Currently in the tree it is setup to be "posix", with a fair amount of work already done in that direction -- in particular, the Unix interfaces.
> 
> However, I think this target is potentially an odd beast. Potentially it is two targets.
> I guess this mimics cygwin vs. mingwin. Exactly.
> 
> The "host" is gcc. In order to build this system, one needs "gmake", sh, gcc probably (I'm assuming Visual C++'s compiler/linker cannot build m3cg, but very maybe..).
> 
> In order to build anything with this system, one needs "as", and most likely ld.
>   (I quote "as" because it is an English word and confusing to read otherwise.)
> Changing it to output assembly for masm or even Visual C++'s inline __asm is probably actually viable, but not a tiny short term task.
> (Or maybe writing an as clone that outputs .objs? Maybe using nasm/yasm??? Not sure the point, maybe "as" is perfectly ok.)
> 
> And then the question arises as to what it takes to run the output.
> As I've said in other topics, the C runtime dependency of Modula-3 is light -- startup code mainly, but, yeah, also important setjmp/longjmp, and multiplication/division helpers sometimes. This could perhaps all be statically linked. Certainly for Visual C++ it can be.
> (NOTE: The Cygwin jmp_buf is much larger than Visual C++'s. A THOUGHT is to grow them to the same, for object code compatibility, but probably not useful, and very wasteful, Cygwin's is much larger, the data in the existing code I verified is correct, like 0x40 vs. 0xD0 I think it was, I just did printf("%x", sizeof(jmp_buf)).)
> 
> To get m3core to build, I switched NT386GNU to use Win32 threads.
> For THAT to build, I switched OSTYPE to Win32. Overkill perhaps, in order to get the Win32 *.i3 files.
> Overkill perhaps, but it does build.
> 
> I fully suspect that old style Posix threads can work easily, and that pthreads can work easily, increasing the dependency on cygwin1.dll.
> While this is the "other" direction, given the dependency on as, and gcc to build m3cg, probably the horse is out of the barn.
> This is arguably a simpler answer, less hybrid.
> 
> I think the analogy to cygwin/mingwin holds, possibly perfectly.
> 
> Maybe this is two targets.
>   NT386CYGWIN  ?  
>   NT386MINGWIN ? 
> 
> (Which begs the point -- target naming.... NT386 vs. PPC_LINUX...OS+ARCH vs. ARCH + _ + OS, etc... but ARCH and OS aren't it, there is toolchain and C runtime in the mix..)
> 
> Obviously SOMETHING is better than NOTHING and I have no useful binary distribution yet to show, so these questions are all very premature.
> 
> I'm also unsure as to the "seriousness" of using the GNU tools.
> a) There don't seem to be many users of Modula-3 on Win32.
> b) Will such users accept/trust a non Microsoft toolchain?
> (Just what to do folks do with cygwin/mingwin? Build/ship real software?)

One of my reasons for using m3 long ago was that I could write programs 
that would run on both Linux and Windows *without* using the Microsoft 
tools, which I did not possess.

-- hendrik