[Gcl-devel] Mach-O BFD back-end

[Aurelien Chanudet]

Hi all,

It looks like the Mac OS X port is getting into good shape. Jun Sawada 
has just reported about successfully compiling and testing ACL2/GCL 
with gcc 3.1, and I've done the same myself with gcc 3.3. Maybe we're 
no ready to ship a binary image !

On top of that, I've nearly finished adding missing functionalities to 
the Mach-O BFD back-end. This means that I'm now able to build GCL 
using the --enable-locbfd configure switch. I haven't thoroughly tested 
the dynamic loading mechanism yet, but, from what I can see, everything 
seems to work fine already.

In order to get a functional libbfd.a for Mach-O, some source files 
could be added to GCL's local BFD tree. Assuming a functional libbfd.a 
targeting Mach-O, all that needs to be done to build GCL is to slightly 
modify build_symbol_table_bfd. This is because, it cannot be inferred 
that an undefined symbol is imported from a library if its name 
contains the substring "@@" (which is what the existing code in 
build_symbol_table_bfd does, as I understand it) on Mac OS X.

I'm now aiming at getting a fully reliable Mach-O BFD backend.

Aurelien