m68k MacOS target support?

[lars brinkhoff]

Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> writes:
> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Meissner <meissner@cygnus.com> writes:
>     Michael> You never know.  There is after all, somebody porting GCC
>     Michael> to the Dec-10 architecture, something like 10-15 years
>     Michael> after DEC stopped making them (I don't recall when the
>     Michael> plug was pulled).  I seem to recall discussion about the
>     Michael> VAX and GCC working on pristine BSD 4.3 in the last 2
>     Michael> months.  Unfortunately, the AS400 effort seems to be
>     Michael> running into a wall.
> 
> For the record, I don't think that we (as mainline GCC developers)
> should worry about these kinds of platforms, and I think Stan's
> comments show a very mature mode of thinking towards 68K Macs.  There
> is a large burden in dragging around old ports, trying to make sure
> Makefiles work there, and so forth.  If someone else wants to keep GCC
> working on a Dec-10, or a PDP-11, or an SV3 system, or whatever that's
> just great -- but I don't think we should worry about those systems
> when maintaining GCC.

That's very interesting, because I'd like to know if the GCC
maintainers are interested in the changes I would have to make to GCC
for it to support the different PDP-10 pointer formats.

It's my intention that the changes should be as non-intrusive as
possible and make GCC easier to port to other architectures with
unsusual pointer formats.  My employer may be willing to sponsor this
if it's an improvement of GCC.  But if the GCC maintainers are not
interested in this, I'd rather just make the changes necessary for
PDP-10 without considering other architectures.

The same goes for binutils and GDB, by the way.

I certainly don't expect the maintainers to actively maintain the
PDP-10 back end, or even care much if it breaks.