Marco Maggi a écrit :
Ciao,
I am experimenting with the FFI of Neko on a Linux+GNU system.
I am a little disappointed by the packaging for Linux.
1) I have no interest in Apache and mod_neko, so I have no
Apache installed and mod_neko compiling fails; it seems to
me that the only way to turn off mod_neko compiling is to
modify the build system; is this correct?
Yes, you'll have to remove mod_neko from std/tools/install.neko
However it shouldn't fail while compiling. What kind of error does it
print ?
2) The executables under "bin": "neko", "nekoc", "nekoml",
"nekotools" have no documentation for command line
invocation;
am I correct that everything can be done with "neko"? If I
strip the symbols it looks like all these executables are
equal,
is this correct?
Neko is the VM bootstrap.
In order to build standalone executable, it's possible to append it some
bytecode. For instance : nekoc = neko+nekoc.n
They are different executables, please don't strip them ;)
You can use --help for the list of nekoc and nekotools options
nekoml is a bit broken in 1.7.1, you'll have to use CVS version.
3) I did a custom installation (to build a Slackware local
package)
and the result is this layout:
lib/
lib/libneko.so
lib/neko/
lib/neko/nekoc.n
lib/neko/nekoml.n
lib/neko/std.ndll
lib/neko/nekoml.std
bin/
bin/neko
include/
include/neko.h
include/neko_vm.h
include/neko_mod.h
by some very basic tests it seems to work; did I left out
something?
You can choose to either include nekoc.n and nekoml.n , but you'll have
to run
"neko nekoc" and "neko nekoml"
Or to include instead unstripped binaries "bin/nekoc" and "bin/nekoml".
Same for nekotools.
4) Due to personal problems I would really like to have
documentation
in Texinfo format; I am willing to try a conversion from the
available format; is the documentation only available in HTML
from the Neko webpages?
Documentation of libraries is exactracted from C code. Have a look at
neko/src/neko/Doc.nml to_html if you want to change output format.
5) A first look at the "Makefile" tells me that the build
system has
important steps written in Neko itself; despite this it
should be
possible to write an Autoconf configuration (no Automake,
no Libtool)
to be used on Linux only; are there known problems or
gotchas one has
to know before attempting?
once the libneko + std library is built, it's much more easy to use a
real programming language instead of autoconf. At least that's my point
of view.
5) The "neko" executable has no command line switching like
"--version",
"--help", "--load" (for modules), "--directory"
(alternative to
"NEKOPATH"), "--compile"; is "main.c" stable enough to
try to add a
command line interface or the fact that some options have
to be handed
to the low level Neko code makes this a problem? (Do not
worry about
the getopts function, I have code of my own)
You can modify it in neko/vm/main.c if you want, but the idea is to have
the vm bootstrap as small as possible. You can do all these things using
a neko script anyway.
Nicolas
--
Neko : One VM to run them all
(http://nekovm.org)
