Orlando Llanes wrote:
Maybe someone oughta make a "real" BeOS port of GPC :) I don't know ifit's possible on version 3.x of BeOS since it does not use the COFF format (but Be is not going to support BeOS 3 for long anyway). But the weird thing is that BeOS 3 has a GCC compiler. I think that the OS specific calls use a lib anyway, so it *might* be a simple matter of recompiling GPC. I don't know if BeOS' GCC is capable of creating GUI apps, if it is, GPC can easily do so as well.
All it takes is a port of the binutils (i.e., as and ld), a GCC backend (the harder part is the processor specific part, and this, of course, exists already for the other OS's), and some standard libraries, in particular a more-or-less POSIX compatible libc.
I don't know if BeOS is (or aims to be) POSIX compliant, but even if not, it is possible to write a POSIX layer on top of the system, like e.g. DJGPP which provides a very faithful and extensive POSIX layer on top of Dos which is about as far from POSIX as possible. ;-)
If GCC works on BeOS, then there probably are already binutils and the backend, and also the libraries unless the compiler is used only for non-standard programs, so indeed it might be a simple matter of recompiling. (Compiling natively on BeOS requires some more tools like sh, make, sed, etc., but if they don't exist and can't be compiled, it's also possible to cross-compile GPC for BeOS from, say, a Linux host.)
Frank