Re: [Matlisp-users] Matlisp on OS X

[Jeremy S. <sh...@op...>]

As another aside, I was an OS X fan myself, and used it extensively (did a
lot with Haskell FFI under OS X) for my research and private projects.  The
OS itself is beautiful (although the library system is a little
out-of-the-ordinary and I have no tolerance of Objective C).

DISCLAIMER:  My gripes relate to my experience with an Apple Laptop, which
got regular programmer wear-n-tear.  YMMV.

My problem came from the hardware, which you are stuck using if you like OS
X.  I had a laptop that went through two external power thingies, then the
DVD-ROM drive would not close.  It started becoming very frustrating when
the airport card (or antenna) worked "intermittently", and before I knew it,
the computer wouldn't even turn on.  The power button is basically useless,
no response at all from the machine.

The majority of this happened a few months after my initial AppleCare plan
was done and I don't feel like paying a sixth of the price of the laptop
(when new) again.  I don't know that my work won't be stranded on the drive
again, and that I won't be stopped for weeks while it's being fixed -- this
makes it effectively useless to me.

I paid the premium (and there is one, the laptop was slower than a
price-equivalent x86 in comparison, running the same matrix operations) for
OS X, and to ensure that the laptop's provider was AROUND when it came time
to fix it (as it's not peacemeal-fixable like a desktop).  If I had to do it
all over again, I'd revert to anything Turing-complete with a better
warranty and hardware track record.  OS X is beautiful, but the hardware,
not so much.

In short, I think that the adventurous will "switch", but unless your idea
of fun is porting packages and working 10 months out of 12 while it's being
AppleCared for, the eye candy and peace of mind that Apple will be around to
fix these prevalent problems just aren't worth it.  IMHO.

Jeremy



----- Original Message -----
From: <ju...@mi...>
To: "Raymond Toy" <to...@rt...>
Cc: <si...@EE...>; <mat...@li...>
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 4:59 PM
Subject: Re: [Matlisp-users] Matlisp on OS X


> Hi again
>
> Thanks to those who have taken the time to offer me some help. In reply to
> Raymond's email about checking the C compiler is working, I have been able
> to build a C helloworld app fine, and the binary produced using the "gcc
> -c -O2 helloworld.c" syntax is called helloworld. So, I don't know where
> the name b.out is coming from.
>
> In reply to Tunc's email, I guess there are greater forces at play than my
> non-mainstream OS and lack of experience hacking it.
>
> I'd love to get Matlisp going on OS X if possible, and I'm more than
> willing to help out in any way I can, but I guess you guys have more
> experience getting Matlisp to play nice on UNIX.
>
> As an aside, I'm seeing more and more people 'switch' over to OS X (if
> you'll excuse the marketing victim speak), particularly for scientific
> work. I know two academic in my dept. who have moved from Linux to OS X,
> and several others who have fallen in love with Apple's line of laptops
> and are going to 'switch' when they next get a new computer. So, that
> being said, I'd encourage support of OS X by the OSS crowd as far as
> possible.
>
> Most people use fink (fink.sourceforge.net) to install UNIX apps for OS X,
> so perhaps they might be a useful resource to tap into if there is
> significant work to be done to port Matlisp to OS X *and* you guys think
> this is worth doing.</my .10c>
>
> Thanks again
>
> Chris
>
>
> On 21 Apr 2003, Raymond Toy wrote:
>
> > >>>>> "Chris" == junk2  <ju...@mi...> writes:
> >
> >     Chris> So, again, b.out appears, although I can't actually see that
file on my
> >     Chris> system (nor the conftest.c file) -- perhaps these get cleaned
up in the
> >     Chris> ./configure... script?
> >
> > Yes, configure will clean it up.  Before we can make progress, we'll
> > have to solve this problem.  (I do have an iMac running OSX at home,
> > but don't have acl.)
> >
> > Try looking through the generated configure script.  Find the place
> > where conftest.c is created.  And try to compile that up by hand.
> >
> > Or you could just do a simple "Hello world!" program, and compile it
> > using "gcc -c -O2 hello.c" and see where the output goes.  It seems
> > that b.out is ok.  Then try to run it.
> >
> >     Chris> One thing I have just remembered: When writing C++ code for
OS X, one has
> >     Chris> to explicitly link against libstdc++.a, which, as far as I
understand, is
> >     Chris> not the case on Linux, say. Could a similar problem be to
blame here?
> >
> > Matlisp doesn't use any C++ code.
> >
> > Ray
> >
>
>
>
>
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