🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct8.180935.17530@athena.mit.edu> jgshir@athena.mit.edu (John G  
Shirlaw) writes:
> 
> 
> Given that NeXT clames that I forget who but one of the major vendor managed  
to
> port there software to NS486 in less than a day.  I would guess/hope that the
> same porting situation will occure with the NRW.  Thus unless the companies
> making the software using porgramming languidges other than C and IB  
shouldn't be
> a problem on porting.
> 

It took Peter Linss (one of our engineers) a day and a fraction to get the  
current Pages build up and running under NS-486.  The day was because we were  
still developing under NS 3.0 PR2, and NeXT cleverly made some changes (between  
PR2 and 3.0 gold!) as to how ProjectBuilder project trees and makefiles have to  
be set up. It took a while to track down just what the problem was, then to  
change over our entire project tree (which has some 20-odd subprojects in it).  
The fraction was to track down the only incompatibility (3DKit wasn't yet  
ported over to NS-486), put conditional comments around the code using 3DKit  
methods, and recompile. Voila!

Having figured all that out, it take about about two hours to port any current  
build over to NS-486, which is how long it takes to recompile our NS-68k source  
code from scratch. It Just Works(tm).

In article <1992Oct11.064357.4792@serveme.chi.il.us> datec@gagme.chi.il.us  
(Charles Robinson) writes:
> 
> Fat binaries (like those planned for NextStep 486) should solve your concern.
> Basically the (incompatable) binaries are packaged together and NextStep
> figures out which one to load. Developers will, as I understand the current
> situation, be forced to compile on each native system (no cross compilers
> will be available for the 486).
> 

I'd be real surprised if that were true, since the Gnu compiler can emit code  
for just about every processor known to man. (OK, I exaggerate, but not by  
much.) In fact, rumor has it that there are NeXTSTEP development teams in the  
world today who use non-NeXT, non-68k, high-end workstations as "compiler  
servers" for building NeXTSTEP-68k software. (No, it's not us--though I wish it  
were, given the current build time for our software.) If that limitation (no  
cross compilers) *does* turn out to be the case, it's a marketing decision, not  
a technical one. ..bruce..

Bruce F. Webster
CTO, Pages Software Inc.
bwebster@pages.com
#import <pages/disclaimer.h>