[MACTCL] Mac OS X: help with C app which uses Tk?

[Ashley W. <ash...@nt...>]

Hi...

I wonder if someone could help me.

I maintain our research group's software, which is written mainly in C
(about 40k LOC) and makes use of Tcl and Tk.  The source is generically
called Eden, but there are three possible targets, named ttyeden
(command-line interaction), tkeden (interaction through a GUI built with Tk)
and dtkeden (as tkeden but with distributed communication/computation
features).

Eden was originally developed on SunOS, then Solaris... and now it has been
ported to Linux and Windows (using cygwin).  I rewrote the original iMake
based stuff using autoconf to assist with this.  I tried a while back to
port it to Mac OS 9 using CodeWarrior, but it all proved a little tricky.
Now I have Mac OS X, I'm trying again.

I've happily built ttyeden using my familiar autoconf-generated configure
script and Makefiles in Terminal.app.  I'd prefer to use this setup (as I do
on Windows with cygwin) rather than Project Builder as I hope it would then
be easier to maintain this software across the several platforms.

Last night I managed to build tkeden using Jim Ingham's native Tk port (I'd
like to use this as opposed to using an X server, as I'd like to see the
interface use Aqua buttons and so on).

I installed the binaries from MacOSXTk8.4a4.tar.gz, and have a working
Wish.app.  I can compile and link tkeden... I spent a while last night
figuring out that the trick here was to link explicitly with
/Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/Tcl and
/Library/Frameworks/Tk.framework/Tk (-L..., -lTk etc doesn't seem to work).

When I run my application, I now get a partially-drawn interface window, but
then it hangs.  I can use gdb to generate a backtrace:

^C
Program received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
0x7003f4c8 in semaphore_wait_signal_trap ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x7003f4c8 in semaphore_wait_signal_trap ()
#1  0x7003f2c8 in _pthread_cond_wait ()
#2  0x00436820 in Tcl_ConditionWait ()
#3  0x004370cc in Tcl_WaitForEvent ()
#4  0x00417ac4 in Tcl_DoOneEvent ()
#5  0x0087af2c in Tk_MainLoop () at ../generic/tkEvent.c:1257
#6  0x0000482c in main (argc=3, argv=0xbffff9b0) at main.c:1594
#7  0x000022bc in _start ()
#8  0x000020ec in start ()

My application has happily done all its initialisation code and set up a
Tcl_DoWhenIdle call back, which enables the app to get on with processing
its run queue when the interface is in a sensible state.  The Tk_MainLoop
call shown above is pretty much the last thing done in main().

I suspect that perhaps I'm getting the Tcl/Tk initialisation wrong.  I've
had a look at tkMacOSXAppInit.c from the macosx-8-4-branch on CVS and have
copied a few likely-looking things into my Tcl_AppInit() and main().  In
particular, I've added TkMacOSXInitAppleEvents(interp); and
TkMacOSXInitMenus(interp); to Tcl_AppInit() (which doesn't seem to have any
effect) and tried adding Tk_MacOSXSetupTkNotifier(); to main(), which then
causes a similar but deeper hang earlier on (not in the call to
Tk_MacOSXSetupTkNotifier()).

The initialisation code as it stands works on Solaris, Linux and cygwin.  I
don't admit to understanding it fully though.

Can anyone give me any hints, before I go to the next nasty stage of
reducing the code to a test case?  Is there any documentation I should read
in particular... I can't find any docs for TkMacOSXInitAppleEvents etc.
This is my first real attempt at programming on the Mac, but I have
experience on UNIX.

I've just done Software Update to Mac OS X 10.1.2 but I don't have quite the
most recent Developer Tools yet -- I have Project Builder 1.1 (v73.3), cc
version 2.95.2 if that helps.  I'm using a new "white" iBook, 600MHz.

The Eden source is up at <http://sf.net/projects/eden/>.  Our research home
page is <http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/modelling/>.

Many thanks for any help.

Ash.

-- 
          Ashley Ward - Graduate Teaching Assistant - PhD student
     as...@dc... - http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ashley/
Room 3.16, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry