Subject self explanatory

@ilbarbax

Because the lack of manpower doesn't allow us the luxury of working on a project that is not immediately useful?

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@ilbarbax

However it looks like a nice project, when it was first released to OS4, it did not made much wave to the OS4 users and developers IIRC.

@Lazi

What "wave" do you expect?

Alb42 does it for Aros, there is another developer (from morphos camp) helping with Morphos and Amiga (=68k)

They both said they are open to any AmigaOS developer who wants to port it to AmigaOS

@ilbarbax
I stated this several times, and I'll do it again: the OS4 support is still "in there", although probably broken. But I could provide a working current OS4 cross-compiler in 2, a working current (3.1.1 SVN) native compiler in like 3-4 days of work. (Pessimistic estimation.) But we need OS4-specific headers for all the libraries, because OS4 diverted too much from the original Amiga API and ABI (interfaces, .so-s anyone?) to be able to easily share support & header units with the "Trinity" of AROS, MorphOS and classic Amiga.

Therefore we need someone to implement and maintain an "os4units" package, and provide regular builds and testing. But because it's a huge work, and the compiler - as every active project - is a moving target, we need a regular contributor for this, who will not just throw things in there, and leave them to rot. Sadly, these days I don't even have time to work on FPC things I'd like to work on in my free time, and OS4 support is not one of these anyway.

Tell A-Eon to hire me, and you'll get everything, even a full Lazarus for OS4, a lot earlier than the Tabor OS4 release...

No, but seriously, contributions are of course very welcomed, if anyone needs help in FPC/OS4 work or have questions -> contact me or Alb42 (the AROS porter/maintainer).

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@OlafS25

Quote:

What "wave" do you expect?

Me? Nothing at all.

But the author of the port maybe...

Look at this post.

@Lazi

read the post before...

Chain-Q and Alb42 both can live and even sleep without OS4 port

If OS4 camp wants a version someone skilled must contribute to it

If there is noone willing to do it no OS4 support

@OlafS25

Read the question in the topic title.

It contains the acronym 'OS4' with not-so large, but friendly letters.

I have just answared it.

chain-q explains it all. os4 diverted too much from amiga source compatibility. if you want to keep the source compatible not only to amiga, aros and morphos you need likely to populate it with ifdefs beacuse of os4 alone. thats why os4 supprt is being left on the way if there is no prticular interest in it, while other platforms may share the code allright.

Last edited by wawa on 12-Mar-2016 at 12:29 PM.

@wawa
Well, some code can be shared, of course, especially when it comes to higher levels. After all, FPC's slogan is "write once, compile anywhere"...

But I absolutely refuse to pollute the generic Amiga code which works fine on 3 platforms and 4 different CPUs at least with {$IFDEF OS4}IWhatever^.{$ENDIF}SomeAmigaFunction()... Of course the OS4 SDK provides a way (macros) in C language, to hide the interface code, and improve portability. But you can't use macros (to that extent) in Pascal, so you'll probably end up with a truckload of wrapper code, if you want API compatibility with the other three platforms within FPC itself. You can generate most (not all) of these wrappers of course, but it still won't be pretty. And you can't use these wrappers on the lowest level of the RTL (Runtime Libs) code, so that needs to be specific...

On the flip side of the coin, OS4 provides a lot of its own APIs for several tasks, and it would be beneficial to use them anyway I guess, and the generic code can't do that.

All in all, nothing which can't be done, but as I said, it's too much work for my limited free time, esp. if you consider I won't use it, but probably would end up maintaining it forever...

And of course, I didn't really follow news if OS4 went through fundamental changes, so most of my assumptions are based on the work I did on the first OS4 version 10 years ago. So anyone up to date with OS4 API/ABI situation - feel free to fix me.

Last edited by Chain-Q on 12-Mar-2016 at 12:51 PM.

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MorphOS, classic Amiga, demoscene, and stuff
"When a bridge is not enough, build a Viaduct!"
"Strip the Amiga community of speculation and we can fit every forum on a 720k floppy" (by resle)

@Chain-Q

feel your pain. the function parametrizing macros on aros arent that nice to see either imho, even if you could use sdi includes in many cases, but well, thats the 68k legacy at least..

@wawa
Yes, but that's - from the user PoV of the API - is completely hidden anyway. MorphOS has its share of ABI defining macros, so does classic Amiga, actually, in C.

In Free Pascal, we just taught the compiler to generate the end result of those macros on all systems instead, so you can hide all the gory details behind standard Pascal syntax.

Now, the totally fucked up (IMO) move in OS4 with Interfaces was that with this IFoo-> syntax, they successfully lifted parts of these ugly details of the ABI & calling conventions, which every other system tries to hide, into the *syntax level* and the API of the OS, and made it visible *everywhere*. I still find it incredible that someone, somewhere though this was a good idea, from a technical PoV. (For source vendor lock-in, it's perfect, of course. No idea what were their original design priorities...)

Especially, that the end result on the PPC assembly level is more-or-less the same as the base,sysv calling convention of MorphOS...

The alternative would be for FPC, that I ignore the entire Interfaces mess, and invent my own classic Amiga API compatible layer, and I hide the interfaces behind compiler magic as on any other platform. The drawback is, that then I might end up with namespace-collisions, and no existing OS4 programming example from other languages would be really useful -> even more work to be done in FPC itself...

So there. Again, anyone with more OS4 dev experience should feel free to fix my logic/wrong assumptions if I made any above. Also, I'm very open to anyone to offer an alternative solution to the problems I detailed.

Last edited by Chain-Q on 12-Mar-2016 at 02:02 PM.
Last edited by Chain-Q on 12-Mar-2016 at 01:18 PM.
Last edited by Chain-Q on 12-Mar-2016 at 01:17 PM.

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MorphOS, classic Amiga, demoscene, and stuff
"When a bridge is not enough, build a Viaduct!"
"Strip the Amiga community of speculation and we can fit every forum on a 720k floppy" (by resle)

@ilbarbax

Most likely because no one in the OS4 Camp has a strong enough desire to program in pascal.

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@Chain-Q

Quote:

Of course the OS4 SDK provides a way (macros) in C language, to hide the interface code, and improve portability. But you can't use macros (to that extent) in Pascal,

Given that gcc uses 'macro hell' for inserting AmigaOS / MOS systems calls I find that hard to believe, but anyway it not your resposibilty to maintain an AmigaOS4 port any more than it's mine to try and create a and maintain a MOS perl port.

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@broadblues
Quote:

Given that gcc uses 'macro hell' for inserting AmigaOS / MOS systems calls I find that hard to believe

As I wrote, we have added specific support for this in the current compiler, because in Pascal, you couldn't use macros to that extent. (Amiga and MorphOS is documented, but also AROS has it.)

Previously existing FPC 1.0.x on Amiga/68k used hand-written inline assembly wrappers for each and every function (++bloat), and AROS had something based on the macros mentioned by wawa, converted into Pascal functions (also ++bloat), before it got the syscalls implementation.

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MorphOS, classic Amiga, demoscene, and stuff
"When a bridge is not enough, build a Viaduct!"
"Strip the Amiga community of speculation and we can fit every forum on a 720k floppy" (by resle)

@Chain-Q

Quote:

As I wrote, we have added specific support for this in the current compiler, because in Pascal, you couldn't use macros to that extent.

Are you talking about the Pascal code level here? (Is pascal compiler bootstrapped? ie written in Pascal itself?)

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@broadblues
If that is the question, yes, FPC is self hosted, and it's written in Pascal. It doesn't use anything from the official SDKs or another languages (on any platform), we have our own code generators and we try to target ABIs, not translating to another high-level language, like C... So it's not like PortablE, for example.

Edit: Which also means we have our own set of headers for the entire OS API, in Pascal, for all platforms. Plus support for every target/host OS in our own runtime libraries (Pascal equivalent of "libc on steroids", roughly).

Last edited by Chain-Q on 12-Mar-2016 at 04:29 PM.

_________________
MorphOS, classic Amiga, demoscene, and stuff
"When a bridge is not enough, build a Viaduct!"
"Strip the Amiga community of speculation and we can fit every forum on a 720k floppy" (by resle)

@ilbarbax
Tom Breeden went to a lot of trouble to create an OS4 Modula-2 (Sucessor to Pascal) compiler that is available at OS4Depot but I have yet to see any OS4 programs written in Modula-2 other than the ones he has written himself. Are you planning on writing some programs in Pascal? As others have pointed out, there probably isn't much (if any) interest in programming for OS4 with Pascal.

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@Chain-Q

Maybe a bounty then? I would donate to it.

I use Delphi and FPC at work, I absolutey love it, and I am not kidding,

I used and use FPC for handheld barcode and RFID scanners and Delphi for POS programming.

So if you can port a new version of FPC maybe even with Lazarus, I would gladly donate to such a bounty.

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@Yssing
As I wrote, I would like to see someone (How about you? ) stepping up as a regular OS4 maintainer. I would even do a initial current compiler port to support him, without a bounty, so he can focus on the library and headers work, providing builds and fixing bugs, and getting actual apps (like Lazarus) ported.

If this other person still wants to take a bounty to start on it, so be it, I have nothing against it, but it's unlikely I would directly take the bounty.

_________________
MorphOS, classic Amiga, demoscene, and stuff
"When a bridge is not enough, build a Viaduct!"
"Strip the Amiga community of speculation and we can fit every forum on a 720k floppy" (by resle)