Path: csiph.com!1.us.feeder.erje.net!3.us.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: Portable Software Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2023 10:04:31 GMT Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien Sender: johnl@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <23-04-005@comp.compilers> References: <23-03-001@comp.compilers> <23-03-017@comp.compilers> <23-03-022@comp.compilers> <23-03-029@comp.compilers> <23-03-032@comp.compilers> <23-03-042@comp.compilers> Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="6946"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" Keywords: tools Posted-Date: 02 Apr 2023 07:36:49 EDT X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:3447 Hans-Peter Diettrich writes: >Often I had >the impression that the author wanted the program not for use on Windows >machines. Kind of "source open for specific OS only" :-( Whatever we want, it's also a question of what the OS vendor wants. For a Unix, there were a few hoops we had to jump through to make Gforth work: e.g., IRIX 6.5 had a bug in sigaltstack, so we put in a workaround for that; HP/UX's make dealt with files with the same mtime differently from other makes, so we put in a workaround for that. Windows, even with Cygwin, puts up many more hoops to jump through; Bernd Paysan actually jumped through them for Gforth, but a Windows build is still quite a bit of work, so he does that only occasionally. It's no surprise to me that other developers don't jump through these hoops; maybe if someone payed them for it, but why should they do it on their own time? As a recent example of another OS, Apple has intentionally reduced the functionality of mmap() on MacOS on Apple silicon compared to MacOS on Intel. As a result, the development version of Gforth does not work on MacOS on Apple Silicon (it works fine on Linux on Apple Silicon). I spent a day last summer on the MacOS laptop of a friend (an extremely unpleasant experience) trying to find the problem and fix it, and I found the problem, but time ran out before I had a working fix (it did not help that I had to spend a lot of time on working around things that I missed in MacOS). Since then this problem has not reached the top of my ToDo list; and when it does, I will go for the minimal fix, with the result that Gforth on MacOS will run without dynamic native-code generation, i.e., slower than on Linux. - anton -- M. Anton Ertl anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/