Re: Port GCC to Mac OS9?

["John (Eljay) Love-Jensen" <eljay at adobe dot com>]

Hi Jay,

OS/2 and Amiga had a shell and a POSIX layer (proto-POSIX layer?) that was
reasonably amenable to the GCC toolchain.

MPW is not such a shell, as I recall.  MPW was more like interfacing with
bash using emacs -- a document interface to a shell, rather than a
terminal-ish interface to a streaming shell.

I think to get GCC to run on OS9, you'd first need to do what Cygwin did for
Windows... make a POSIX API-compatible workalike layer for OS9, and then
compile bash or tcsh to that POSIX API-workalike layer.

A bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, though.  You may need to write your
POSIX layer in assembly, or using Metrowerks.

And even though the early Macs were very amazing for end-users, they did
introduce some interesting challenges for programmers -- especially for
porting tools from the Unix side of the universe.

Anyway, after having a suitable environment, you would still need to write
the backend for GCC, since OS9 uses PEF and the CFM.

All-in-all, it would be a lot of effort, and a labor of love.

I'd take a long hard look at the available (vintage) tools and strongly
consider embracing them instead.  After all, they went hand-in-hand with
that operating system.  (Sorry to be a killjoy.)

Sincerely,
--Eljay

Apple II Forever!
(Marketing has defined "forever" to be "about 10 years".)