Re: Forth for Mac OS X Leopard (Intel) - what are the options?

On Apr 5, 2:44 am, Ian Osgood <i...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
.... (re: OSX intel gforth)...

> Agreed that the gforth build process is rather arcane.
>
> The quickest way to get get this support is to donate an Intel Mac
> Mini to Berndt (bigForth and gforth). Anton and Berndt have both said
> they just need availablity to a Mac to get gforth and bigForth ported.
>
> Email them your pledge. They could get one when it reaches EURO 600.
I'll
> pledge EURO 50 for starters.

Mmmm... Bernd, Anton et al check out wwwOSX86project.org. Ok I'll
admit it's somewhat err... grey but if you buy a copy of leopard Apple
does get its fair share. One could argue it's fair dinkum if you do
give them their dues and run it on non-apple hardware... but... some
may say otherwise.

I see a lot of people maligning Leopard at the moment - fink guys
won't support it and they even recommend downgrading to 10.4 on their
website so I would suggest Tiger if you're buying but at the moment it
(legal copies) can't be had for love or money in the antipodes.

> I think both Power MacForth and Mops (and ppc gforth) run fine under
> Rosetta PPC emulation. The slowdown is negligible.
>
> I personally use MacPorts gforth 0.6.2 w/o ffcall on an Intel MacBook
> Pro running 10.4.

Agreed. Rosetta is surprisingly good. It ran my old PPC M$ Word with
no perceivable slow down -
my wife is running her PPC photoshop quite happily as well. I recall
someone once posted some very encouraging benches for MOPS/MacForth
under Rosetta which if memory serves me right is quite close to what
gforth is doing natively.... At least certainly not magnitudes off.
Correct me if I am wrong.

On my mac, I boot into debian to mess with MPE's VFX to be honest.
I've been trying to look thru' ffcall on OSX to sort this mess out
this past hour, ultimately it seems like my time could be better spent
elsewhere like actually making a set of words to interface GTK<->VFX.
It means sifting thru' all the header files getting to know all the
structs, the constants etc... But I always think of something else to
do to waste my time like tweak my Eee PC more. If I ever get it done I
shall put a link up though.

I do lament the premature 'death' of the PPC from the desktop market,
though. I would really have loved to see more better PPC's evolve as
an alternative to x86 although I guess I haven't really seen EM64T
yet. Or whatever they are calling it now.

Robert