Re: [Radiator-devel] cli port

[Tim R. <ti...@ga...>]

On Sat, 24 Aug 2002 05:15:58 -0400
Patrick Mahoney <bo...@in...> wrote:
| Tim: did you port the cli to windows?
| I just read that the pthread library has been ported to windows as an
| open source project with the lgpl license...
| http://sources.redhat.com/pthreads-win32/
| 
| Might be as simple as downloading the .dll/.h files, setting you vc++
| environment, and recompiling...

No real need. I just added a #ifdef in the CLI to get it to use
_beginthread on VC++ instead of pthreads. It doesn't seem to use libdl
or curses, either.

I've just started porting my testbed app to the new architecture.
However, I've come up against a fundamental obstacle: Environment
doesn't allow access to the names of modules' ports (this will be a
problem for the GUI too, clearly). I think the solution would be to add,
say, Module* Environment::get_module(int id), but I'll leave it until
I'm sure that you (Pat) can still compile with the changes I've made to
the codebase.

The major points:
-- Changed register_plugin to:

	extern "C" void register_plugin( void *param, 
		void (*add_module) (void *, const char *, CREATOR_FUNC))

Using a function instead of std::map avoids big problems on Windows. I
didn't get to the root cause, but I think it relates to the problem of
using new and delete across DLL boundaries: the DLL (basic.rap) uses one
heap, the EXE (cli.exe) uses another. When one tries to free the other's
memory you get a crash. I think that std::map was trying to do something
similar and it broke. In any case, calling the function avoids mixing
C++ standard library implementations (what if you wrote plugins in
Cygwin and the EXE in VC++? their template implementations are different).

-- Got src/plugins to link to bin/basic.rap instead of lots of .so. This
resulted in a huge saving of disk space (with gcc each .so was taking up
700KB on disk with symbols included). This also avoids the need for me
to maintain one VC++ project per module (VC++ only allows one target per
project).

-- Changed .shared rule to .shared.o. This lets us use .d files for
sources that will always compile to .shared.o (the include $(OBJS:.o=.d)
doesn't know about .shared but it does know about .shared.o).

-- Put POSIX-specific dlXXX functionality into environment_linux.cpp.
The linux part of the string should be set to whatever $(PLATFORM) is
set to in make.conf.

-- 
Tim Robinson <ti...@ga...>