[Openmcl-devel] Openmcl and Tiger

[Gary Byers]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Lawrence E. Bakst wrote:

> When TIger is released, what will be the status of Openmcl?
>
> As I think most people know, Tiger is widely rumored to have gone GM
> and will probably be released this month. As soon as Tiger is
> released, I plan on upgrading.
>
>  From Gary's previous post it seems like Openmcl might not yet be
> working under Tiger.
>
> Could we get please get some clarification?

To the best of my knowledge, everything in the released 0.14.3 works
under Tiger except for the Cocoa demo.  (That's -not- true of earlier
versions; a workaround for a long-standing Jaguar/Panther G5 bug
doesn't work on Tiger.  Raffael Cavallero was able to test another
workaround on old, affected G5 systems, and 0.14.3 incorporates that
workaround.)

The post-0.14.3 bleeding-edge changes are mostly orthogonal (they
-mostly- have to do with avoiding register-usage conflicts on Linux
and with isolating PPC32/PPC64 dependencies in the compiler and
assembler.)

>
> I would think that getting something up and running under Tiger
> should be a high priority. If the Cocoa stuff takes longer because of
> GCC and other changes fine, but a new dppccl and interface database
> would be much appreciated.

It is (and has been) a high priority (at least for the last month or
so; in a perfect world, I would have been working on this harder and
sooner, but it's not a perfect world.)

If the Cocoa bridge doesn't work as of the official Tiger release,
it -should- (knock wood) work soon after.  (That strongly suggests
that there'll need to be an 0.14.4 release as soon as the Cocoa
stuff works.)

As I said in my previous message, I think that the best way to get the
Cocoa bridge working involves having the interface translator produce
ObjC class and method information and having the bridge use that
information (instead of trying to obtain that information via
introspection.)  I think that I have that working pretty well in
a translator based on GCC 3.x, and I'm trying to get that working
with GCC 4.x (since such a translator would also understand the
-m64 option on Darwim, that seems desirable.)

It may be harder than I think it is to change the Cocoa bridge in this
way; if that looks to be the case, I'll try to fix the short-term
problem (different ObjC type encodings in the Cocoa libraries).

I'll try to make a new version of the interface translator available
soon (as in "days", maybe "hours, given sufficient quantities of
caffiene".)

>
> As far as developer NDAs are concerned, it's important to take those
> seriously. However, like most NDAs you aren't bound to keep private
> information that has become public. Given that Apple now has detailed
> white papers on Spotlight and Dashboard as well as significant
> information on the public part of the developer web site, I don't
> think talking about getting an application (Openmcl) running on TIger
> is really violating any confidentiality, unless there was some kind
> of detailed developer only information revealed.
>
> http://images.apple.com/macosx/tiger/pdf/Spotlight_Tech_Preview_20050111.pdf
>
> http://images.apple.com/macosx/tiger/pdf/Dashboard_Tech_Preview_20050111.pdf
>
> http://developer.apple.com/
>

I don't mean to be totally stupid about this, but I'm also trying to
err on the side of paranoia.

Not saying anything at all probably constitutes "erring on the side of
catatonia", which may be taking things a bit too far.

> Best,
>
> leb
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