Re: multiple compilers

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Christopher,

* Christopher Hulbert wrote on Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 12:35:43AM CEST:
> 
> The cell processor has 2 different "architecture" cores. There's a
> compiler for the PowerPC and a compiler for the SPU. The SPU image can
> be embedded into the powerpc executable via a special command, or the
> powerpc code can load the SPU image much the same way as dlopen. In my
> case, I have a main driver function that will load the "shared" object
> from the SPU and spawn off some threads onto these SPU cores. So, to
> compile both the PPU and SPU binaries, I have to have a custom-written
> makefile or two seperately configured directories.

How about two separately configured directories, plus outside of them
some scripting to stitch them together?  This issue is somewhat related
(but only somewhat!) to those multi-arch libraries/binaries that one can
create on Darwin, so maybe you can profit from what they have.

> Another thought I had was trying to figure out if there would be a
> clean way to extend libtool to a general language. Then I could just
> call the SPU code some other language and do it that way. Alas though,
> custom Makefiles are probably not as bad as cleanly implementing
> either approach :).

This would require support from both Automake and Libtool.  Actually, if
you can do the separation per-directory, you can just override $(CC) in
one Makefile, but then you still need to get Libtool to have another tag
for the "other" C compiler.  This requires modifying libtool.m4 AFAICS.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf