On 19/07/2005, at 10:27 AM, Joshua Juran wrote:
I'm porting perl to a platform called Genie, which is a Unix-like subsystem that runs in Mac OS. The purpose of this exercise is to have a command-line perl tool available for Mac OS, in a stdio environment with polymorphic file descriptors, without the limitations of MPW.
Good to hear. You don't say whether this is PPC or 68k Mac OS. I guess the former, though the FAQs on your site make me wonder.
Back in the day, I worked on keeping Perl running on PPC MachTen, a commercial UNIX-under-Mac OS product from Tenon Intersystems (http:// www.tenon.com). The product, though still apparently available, is, as far as I know, unsupported, and suffers from a number of long- standing bugs and security issues. Vague requests from some users that the code be open-sourced after support ended were rebuffed.
MachTen was delivered with gcc, so I didn't use MPW or CodeWarrior in porting perl. If you search in old perl5-porters archives, you'll find mail about various issues I tripped over, including malloc() (once tweaked to work, Perl's own malloc was much faster than Mac OS' own); and fork() (MachTen, thanks to deep and probably dark magic, has both fork() and vfork(), but the latter is MUCH faster, as Mac OS does not support Copy on Write). You'll also find clues in hints/ machten.sh.
Or contact me. -- Dominic Dunlop
