Update 14 Feb 2003 I think this is a significant milestone. Binaries to build Swarm models on MacOS X 10.2.x are now available on the Swarm web site. http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/swarm/macosx.pkg Included is everything needed to use Swarm on a standard MacOS X 10.2.x install with Apple December 2002 developer Tools. It includes almost everything needed to build the Swarm libraries from source - gcc3.3, Tcl/Tk, BLT and gnused. Java, HDF5 anf MacOSX pre 1.2 are not supported. It is known to build and run heatbugs and mousetrap. Please let us know what else they support and what breaks. Comments please to support@swarm.org. Please check the archives before posting to avoid duplication. Bill Northcott w.northcott@unsw.edu.au 14 Feb 03 **************************** Swarm MacOS X port status 2 Jan 2003 If someone could find some time, it should now be possible to do an X-Windows build of Swarm Libraries on MacOS X. Apple have done a lot of work to make the latest (10.2.3) versions of MacOS X much more compatable with standard UNIX software. The system compiler is now gcc3.1 and gcc3.3 can be obtained and built from Apple's OpenSource cvs without difficulty. Many more GNU utilities and man pages are in the standard build. All prerequisite packages are now available as binaries or can easily be compiled. Xfree86 4.2 is available as a binary package and can be used with a number of window managers of which the best would seem to be OroborosX. Tkl/Tk 8.4.1 and HDF 1.5.42 will build from source without modification as MacOS X dylibs. BLT 2.4z will build and run with minor modifications to the autoconf files. Aqua (native display server) versions of Tcl/Tk are now fairly solid, but BLT makes many calls to X-windows APIs which will make a full Aqua version difficult. Sources or compiled code can be obtained as Xfree86 (binary and source) http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx OroborosX (binary and source) http://oroborosx.sourceforge.net/ Tcl/Tk (source and Aqua binaries) http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl HDF5 (source) http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ BLT (source) http://sourceforge.net/projects/blt BLT (patches and binary) http://savannah.nongnu.org/patch/?group=swarm Documentation on MacOS X porting issues can be found at http://developer.apple.com/unix/ and more specifically http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Darwin/GettingStarted/PortingUNIX/index.html Current Swarm CVS code can be obtained from the savannah address above and can be configured on MacOS X. Currently attempts to compile this code fail. However Alex Perrone reports that he has succeeded in making a static build against older versions of Tcl/Tk/BLT and that this build will run the simplest non-gui Swarm demos. We are working actively on this and any help would be appreciated. Once this initial X-windows build is usable, there remain some significant issues to addresss. MacOS X should be the perfect Swarm platform. It is a direct descendant of the Next systems on which much of the original Swarm work was done, and like Next it is an Objective-C based system. There is an excellent free IDE, a very good Java implementation and the system compiler is gcc3.1. Unfortunately the fact it is Objective-C based is the bigest problem. Swarm uses a modified version of the GNU Objective-C runtime, while Apple has a quite different runtime using a different C API. This means that there is no simple way for Swarm code to call Apple APIs or vice versa. There seems to be some promise in an approach using Apple's NSConnection and NSProxy classes. This might be made easier if Swarm was merged with the current GNUstep Foundation code which is once more under active development. This would seem to be an interesting project for a keen programmer. If this problem could be solved then Apple's Cocoa APIs could easily be used to build masses of extra functionality into Swarm based applications. Bill Northcottw northcott@unsw.edu.au