While I am generally in favor of this idea (and I did get the first miniparrots to work, pretty much as proof of concept), I do think it's likely to be rather challenging (and interesting):
Remember, _pure_ C89 provides only these headers:
<assert.h> <complex.h> <ctype.h> <errno.h> <fenv.h> <float.h> <inttypes.h> <iso646.h> <limits.h> <locale.h> <math.h> <setjmp.h> <signal.h> <stdarg.h> <stdbool.h> <stddef.h> <stdio.h> <stdlib.h> <string.h> <tgmath.h> <time.h> <wchar.h> <wctype.h>
This leaves out a number of things that one would really like to have to do system probing, most notably:
- file info (stat, fstat)
Yep, these are a pain. Luckily the simple stuff (like "Does the file even exist?") can be done with open and its return status.
- executing programs in any kind of sophisticated way (fork/exec, pipes)
We do get system and popen, though.
My only real point is that, while I think pure c89 is a nice goal, in practice we will need to relax this just a bit, to include at the very least, things like unistd and bits of posix that are likely to be everywhere. Should be interesting.
Yeah, there's no reason that the basic system can't have some #ifdefs for the really common things.
Probably isn't going to really gain momentum until we get some of the build system written in something that compiles down to run on parrot.. How's that perl 6 compiler coming? ;-)
I'm more than happy to start writing the remaining environment probes in pir. :)
At 18:20 on 09/07/2004 EDT, Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> bytecodeThis argument's old. Very old, so it may be unfamiliar to many people. The subject generates enough heat that I don't want to go there again.
We are not using autoconf. Period.
Parrot's build process, when shipped will be:
*) Person building runs platform-specific script *) Script builds miniparrot, which assumes ANSI C89 functionality only *) Miniparrot runs provided configure program, which is in bytecode *) Configure probes environment *) Full parrot is built *) Full parrot is then invoked to complete the build process, which is driven by a program written in a parrot language and provided as
-- Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
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