[line-devel] RE: [line] Applications list broken

[Michael V. <mi...@bl...>]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Andrew G. Tereschenko wrote:

> Probably you aready know about this too - there is similar project
> "lxrun" for running Linux ELF under Solaris.
> They have script for installing needed number of libs/binaries from RedHat
> CD
> for a fully functional enviroment.
> I will try to use it as basis for Line.

Sounds good!  I have a little script that I started on a while ago to do
something similar that you may find useful.  It's attached to this email.


> > > How about idea to provide MSVC dsw project/makefiles for all
> > *.exe/*.sys ?
> >
> > That would be great, but LINE requires GCC to compile.  You can't use the
> > Microsoft C compiler.   My main problem with using MSVC is that it means
> > that anybody that wants to develop for LINE must have a copy and MSVC
> > isn't freely available.
>
> I'm unshore - but there is some compiler binaries available freely in DDK.
> They can used (I'm not an expert in licensing - somebody need to verify
> this)
> What if we will try to create portable code ?

Actually I originally started writing LINE in MSVC because the integrated
debugger is so much nicer to use than gdb.  However once I started using
the Cygwin DLL, I switched over to gcc.  Most of the code should be
portable between the two compilers.  A couple problem points would be:

- gcc specific inline assembly in src/linexec/asm.h
  (but it is no big deal to put a compiler specific #ifdef around it)

- gcc preprocessor extensions in src/common/log.h

But the biggest problem is that LINE needs the Cygwin runtime environment.
From what I've read on the Cygwin site you can't mix the Cygwin runtime
with the MSVC runtime.  This means at the very least you need to link LINE
with the Cygwin/gcc linker.  It may be possible to compile the object
files using MSVC, but I don't see much point to it (other than that MSVC
does compile much faster than gcc on my machine).

What would be really cool is if the gdb debugging information in the
resulting executables could be massaged into a format recognizable by
MSVC.


Mike