Yesterday, I wrote a small test program and linked it against Apple's
"Carbon framework". To my surprise, it worked. So, against all
expectations, the current compiler is able to link to Apple "dylibs"
and Apple "frameworks". The compiler produces ".o" code and the
Apple-"ld" linker takes care of the rest.
This implies, that I am loosing interest in the Apple-patched GCC
compiler. Apple writes "we're not even sure what all of them [the
compiler changes] are, because the existing compiler has many
undocumented changes inherited from 10 years of NeXT and Apple hacking,
and nobody knows what some of them are for." This doesn't inspire
confidence.
Besides, important changes (like precompiled header support) are now
getting integrated into mainline FSF. So, I am slowly considering it an
advantage (rather than a disadvantage) that the current port is based
on mainline FSF-GCC 3.2.1. And isn't it fun to read in officlal Apple
docs for some compiler option "Not supported on Mac OS X" where the GPC
compiler actually does ....
As a further experiment, I compiled hello.pas into hello.o and tried to
link it with "mwld", the command-line version of the MetroWerks
CodeWarrior linker. Again, to my surprise, it worked. I added "hello.o"
to a CodeWarrior Project and disassembled it there. It worked. So,
maybe some day there will be a GNU Pascal compiler plug-in CodeWarrior
(not a promise, just an idea) ....
Regards,
Adriaan van Os