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Re: GNUstep on Android


From: Mathias Bauer
Subject: Re: GNUstep on Android
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 15:45:09 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.4.0

I tried to compile libobjc2 with a standalone-toolchain based on the current NDK (contains clang 3.4) on Ubuntu_64 (12.04).

After removing some lines in the CMakeLists.txt of libibjc2 that are not needed, but don' work, I got the makefiles generated with CMake. Thanks for your "script" BTW, it helped me to figure out how to tell CMake what to do and so saved me a lot of time!

Calling "make" however ended up in the assembler complaining that the selected processor "does not support ARM mode blx r3" and the like. I added -integrated-as to the flags for C and C++ files and then the make went on to 40% and then complained about a similar problem again. I also saw some warnings about "soft-float" not being a recognized feature for the target.

As you obviously had more success back then with clang 3.1, maybe it's a problem caused by (not necessarily in) the compiler.

So currently I have no clue how to proceed.

I wonder whether it's possible to use the vanilla clang trunk version instead of the clang provided by the NDK, but probably the NDK clang contains some necessary patches.

Regards,
Mathias

Am 26.03.14 15:48, schrieb Ivan Vučica:
Any work I have done has focused solely on getting *something* to work.
I've essentially tested if NSString works, and that's about it.

The best way to determine whether something you're interested works is
to try it out. I wasn't personally interested in getting more than a
proof that it is possible to continue to work on gnustep-base. And it is
possible. One can sit down, iterate and contribute upstream. Even that's
fantastic news compared to, say, four years ago. You "only" have to deal
with a nonstandard libc, nonstandard directory layouts, nonstandard
sandboxing approaches and a requirement to interface with Java. You
don't have to build your own compiler, deal with a custom build system
or (as was the case until recently on certain other platforms) find a
way to target a proprietary bytecode VM...

I'd say that, similar to any other platform where portability is not
proven yet nor guaranteed, it is best to start a project 'from scratch'
and work on target ports 'in parallel', adapting to quirks of each in
the process. Based on what experience I had with targeting Android in
general (and that isn't much), I'd treat porting existing code akin to
starting a new port of a game that draws with DirectX and in general
shows little consideration for non-Win32 platforms -- one year into the
project. It's probably not going to end well (or at least not without
many stolen staplers and burning buildings).


On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Mathias Bauer <mathias_bauer@gmx.net
<mailto:mathias_bauer@gmx.net>> wrote:

    Hi,

    what is the current status for GNUstep base on Android?

    I did some research and found some activity, but mostly older stuff.
    Nowadays one year already is quite old. :-)

     From an external view point I see the following possible problems:

    - as Linux/ARM showed us, exception handling and unwinding on ARM
    don't work properly with clang <= 3.4, but that's the clang version
    used by the Android NDK; so should we expect similar problems there?

    - I couldn't find reliable information about libdispatch on Android,
    and AFAIR Android does not have a fully compliant implemenation of
    pthreads, so I'm concerned if the pthread-workingqueue lib (a
    prerequisite of libdispatch) works on Android

    - GNUstep base has some prerequisites like libxml2 etc.; I think
    they all need to be compiled for Android also

    - I wonder if there is an NSNetServices implementation in GNUstep
    that works on Android

    I know that there is apportable.com <http://apportable.com>, but
    they claim not to use GNUstep anymore, so this does not give any
    hints about the feasability of using GNUstep/libobjc2/libdispatch
    for porting Objective-C code (at least code that does not use GUI
    classes) from iOS to Android.

    Regards,
    Mathias

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Ivan Vučica
ivan@vucica.net
<mailto:ivan@vucica.net>



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