[kaffe] Native Cygwin Kaffe for Cygwin/Xfree

[Nicholas Wourms]

Jim Pick wrote:

>Good questions.  I haven't played with the win32 much yet, other than
>trying to get it to compile.
>
>I just tried configuring it with "./configure
>--with-threads=unix-pthreads", and the compile died in
>kaffe/kaffevm/systems/unix-pthreads/thread-impl.c when it tries to
>include the bits/local_lim.h file, which doesn't exist on cygwin. 
>That's probably non-portable (I think _POSIX_THREAD_THREADS_MAX is the
>#define that is used) and should be fixed.  Any takers?
>
>If pthreads work nicely in cygwin, I'd be very interested in seeing in
>how it compares to our win32 threads.
>
>I imagine X11 support should just work, unfortunately, on my cygwin
>install, I don't seem to have the X11 headers (I did install the XFree86
>stuff in the past).  When I get some time, I'll fix my setup, and try
>testing it.
>
>Cheers,
>
> - Jim
>
Jim,

Well the good news is that gcc-3.1 has just been released for testing on 
cygwin mailing list, compiled with --threads=posix, so the official 
version should be out in a week or so.  I would highly recommend 
updating your cygwin distribution with the latest cygwin has to offer. 
 If you haven't already, grab the latest installer (setup.exe) from 
www.cygwin.com.  For XFree development, may I recommend you get the 
"XFree86-prog" package, which contains the various X11 headers.  Now I 
can't guarantee that every pthread function is there, so if there is 
something need, please let me know.  We have a few dedicated pthreads 
contributors who do take requests, no promises though.  Also, since 
Cygwin include openssl now, wouldn't it be possible to use libcrypto in 
the place of libmd?  AFAICT, libcrypto implements the same functions as 
libmd.  Another thing you might be interested in is that qt2 has been 
fully ported to cygwin, and qt3 is a work in progress (for more info 
http://kde-cygwin.sourcefoge.net).  While these are not "official 
packages" yet, qt2 is quite stable and ready for production use.  I just 
thought I'd mention it since you were working on a qt-awt 
implementation.  As soon as gcc-3.1 is fully tested, I will be releasing 
and maintaining gmp as part of the main distribution.  This should 
further facilitate kaffe's ability to function well on Cygwin.  I 
suppose that's all for now, but thanks for taking the time to look into 
it.  Hopefully, someday, we will be able to kaffe in the main Cygwin 
distribution.

Cheers,
Nicholas

P.S. - Not a day goes by that I don't miss my daily visits to 
kernelnotes.org.  :-(
Thanks for all the hard work you put into it, truly there was no 
substitute (and there still isn't)!