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

On Apr 8, 8:18 am, Albert van der Horst <alb...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
....
> Use a standard assembler if available.
> Use the standard linker.
> See what happens.
> E.g. with nasm on linux
>         nasm -felf lina.asm -o lina.o
>         ld lina.o -o lina
> It doesn't get much simpler than that.
> It worked when I knew nothing more about the elf-format
> than that it existed.
> Now SAVE-SYSTEM was a little more work.

You said it.


It is as I feared. I am now fairly convinced after a bit of googling
that elf's are a no-go on OS X. For example:

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/24/0114221

http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-os-x-executes-applications.html

mach-o's look a little bit complicated, but I'm sure with time I'll
figure it out.

If anyone's so inclined to advise me on how to 'section' out the
source code a little better I'd be very grateful.

Also I've been sleeping over what you said about the LINOS, Albert.

I think it would probably be best in the end to build a completely
independent macho-o OS X forth fork with a XNUOS word for example as,
as you say, there will be times when one will want to call XNU direct.

Then port the libraries.

In the interim, if I mark out the differences between linux and the
XNU kernel, I may be able to make the LINOS words compatible with old
code. This may be a lot more work than I imagine if not just the
function/jumptable indices differ, but if the number of parameters/
returns differ.

I might look at the BSD linux compatibility layer source for hints -
assuming XNU follows BSD closely.

The most pressing thing however is to see if I am actually making mach-
o binaries correctly. So if anyone with experience building OS-X IA-32
binaries could look and advise I would be very grateful.

I'm sure there is a some reason why apple chose to use mach-o's
exclusively but I can't see why they left out support for elfs. It
would make porting much easier.

Thanks very much

Robert Spykerman