PPC 64bit library status?

[Bill Northcott]

For what are probably misguided reasons I am trying to build Apple  
style compilers which include gfortran, libffi and libobjc.

This was not a particular problem with the latest apple-ppc-branch  
sources (apple-ppc-5013) until I got MacOS X 10.4 Tiger yesterday.

On Darwin8/MacOS X 10.4 the Apple gcc build includes both 32 and 64  
bit versions of libgcc, libiberty and libstdc++.

When I alter the build_gcc script and the configure files to build  
gfortran, libffi and libobjc, the build tries to make 64 bit versions  
of libgfortran, libgfortranbegin, libffi and libobjc-gnu.

There are a number of problems:
1.  Since I am using a PPC7455 based computer 64bit executables won't  
run and the 64 bit libraries are effectively cross compilations.  So  
the configure scripts need the same APPLE LOCAL mods used in libstdc+ 
+ to avoid testing in the configure script whether the compiler can  
build executables.  (with the -m64 flag the executables are built but  
they won't run).
This would not be an issue on a PPC970(G5)  cpu.
2. libgfortran.h line 63 defines int8_t.  This is already defined in / 
usr/lib/ppc/types.h.  So I think the libgfortran.h define needs to be  
conditional on _INT8_H.

Even if the libraries build, will libffi or libobjc work on 64 bit  
PPC????  Since I don't have access to a 64 bit PPC machine I cannot  
test this.

There is an even murkier question about what happens with Darwin 8 on  
x86.

Bill Northcott