[Openmcl-devel] CCL Cross-Compile or Cross-Dump with Mac OS X target

[R. Matthew Emerson]

On Jan 23, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Mark H. David wrote:

> Can Clozure support cross-compiling (or "cross-dumping") to a Mac OS X target?
> I'd really like to be able to build a Mac OS X image from  CCL/Linux. 
> I saw this sort of feature is being used for iOS development, where I read they used the term "cross-dump", but as far as I can tell it's not possible for Mac OS X itself as the target, right?

If you mean, "can I cross-compile a complete, ready-to-deploy, heap image file and lisp kernel binary for a Mac OS X target on another system", I think the answer has to be "no" (at least not without moving heaven and earth to do so).

Even if you decide to punt on cross-compiling the lisp kernel binary, the nature of bootstrapping a new lisp image is such that you really need to do the final part of it on the target system.

Gary talks about the bootstrapping process in this message (maybe this is what you read):

http://clozure.com/pipermail/openmcl-devel/2011-November/013102.html

I can try to go on at a little more length if you're interested, but I think that "just use a Mac" is really the easiest way to go here.

I appreciate that with cloud-based services you worry a lot less about hardware maintenance and network access, but $600 for a Mac mini might be a better deal then the aggravation and time you'd spend trying to come up with an alternate solution, in my opinion.  (This is, in fact, what we do for our own automated build testing of CCL:  we have a couple of Mac minis.)




> One reason is we want to automate building, preferrably in the cloud, and the availability of cloud ("EC2-like") instances of Mac OS X seems nonexistent or at least rather complicated and/or expensive.
> (See this Stack Overflow discussion, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7308039/do-on-demand-mac-os-x-cloud-services-exist-comparable-to-amazons-ec2-on-demand)