Hello,
This is an announcement I posted to the m3devel mailing list
yesterday:
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I've been given the task to create a new cm3 release (version 5.4).
The idea behind this is to create a fully tested and working release
of cm3 that will not need a 'd' in front of the version number ;)
I have time to work on this full time for the next four weeks at least.
I will regularly send release status updates to this list.
Help in any form is of course very much appreciated.
I guess I will need some help since I am by no means a Modula3 guru.
Olaf Wagner and I compiled a list of items we'd like to see in this
new release. The list is not set in stone - if anyone has suggestions,
please let us know.
So far, the following features are planned:
* M3GC based on gcc-3.4.5 - I will probably need a bit of
help with this one. I could not get it to work yet.
If you want to help, please see my mail to this
list regarding the issue.
* New garbage collection support turned on by default.
This may also involve removing system call wrapper support.
* Current plotting package
* Current math package
* Dynamic linking by default on platforms that
rarely ship with static libs these days (e.g. Linux)
* Add documentation about how to configure linking for
Modula3 programs.
* CM3IDE (the old Reactor product)
The following targets will definitely be included:
* LINUXLIBC6
* SOLgnu
* FreeBSD4 (tested on FreeBSD-5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1)
* PPC_DARWIN
The following targets may be included (depends on the workload
involved):
* NT386
* PPC_LINUX
* NetBSD2_i386
We would also like to include the current status of the on work
m3gdb by Rodney M. Bates. At least the source code should go into
CVS and into the release tarballs - we are of course hoping to get
release quality binaries. Unfortunately, hacking gdb is far beyond
my abilities, so I probably won't be able to fix serious issues myself.
The following features have been deferred to/planned for
the 5.5 release:
* Targets that did not make it into 5.4
* M3GC based on gcc-4.1.0
* AMD64 support for Linux, Darwin(?), FreeBSD(?),
Windows XP(?), NetBSD(?)
I have already done some work on Linux/AMD64 - so this is
probaly the first item I will start working on after 5.4
* New targets for FreeBSD6, FreeBSD7(?)
and NetBSD3_i386, NetBSD4_i386(?)
* i386 Darwin support
* Fully working m3gdb
* Improved installation (friendlier installation script,
move configuration files into /etc)
I don't know yet whether I will have time to work on the 5.5
release as well this summer. It mainly depends on how fast
5.4 will get out the door.
The following have also been considered.
Frankly we had no idea about the status of these items,
so we did not know where to put them.
* Kernel threads on Linux, Solaris and Darwin
How well is this working?
Is there a switch to turn kernel threads on/off at
compile time? Should we add kernel thread support
to more targets?
* Modula3 support for swig - is it included in the
upstream swig package or should we ship it with
cm3?
Comments appreciated,
--
stefan
http://stsp.in-berlin.de
PGP Key:
0xF59D25F0
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