RE: OMS announcement

From: Treutwein Bernhard <"Treutwein>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 09:18:09 +0200

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although I'm also a bit late, I second Wojtek's statements ...

I did check first the license agrrement within the
"free" distribution. Sadly that is only the "classic"
one. Service Pack one does not replace it, but I hope
that this will change real soon now ...

Wojtek wrote:
[...]
> scenarios. (a) Nothing will change. BlackBox will remain confined to
> a relatively small group of hardcore enthusiasts. (b) BlackBox will
> become more widely known and used, for example in engineering
> and scientific communities. I think we should hope for (b) rather than
> for (a). In order for this to happen, the user community must take
> a more active role. The community will get this chance once
> the sources are released.

I really hope for case (b), but I fear that cas (a) is more
realistic, if we "hardcore" people don't find the time for
making it more easy to collaborate (ideas follow below).

> I can still remember Oberon System V4, where I could start my work
> on a Mac, continue under Windows, finish under Linux, and finally
> run on AIX. Is this possible with BlackBox? I believe it can

if all sources (to my knowledge, OMiSys has a Mac 1.3.2 release
for 68000 and a usable Kernel for Linux) are released, it might
be possible to use the compiler backends of V4 (this might need
some work, but Anes Sadikovich had already ideas how to fit the
NO front ends to the BB backend having only the "private"
interfaces ...).

So it should be possible in principle to get the code generation
working.

But let us stick to the Intel platform first:

Given the deliberate interface design of BlackBox, it should
be possible to write "generic" HostXyz modules for different
GUIs and Linux-Kernel versions which are loaded on demand
(i.e. KDE/Qt, Gnome/GTK).

For this we would need some almost automated interface
generation, which is existing for OOC by Stewart Greenhill
(to my knowledge he started under BlackBox or Oberon/F, but
switched to OOC since BlackBox was too expensive, maybe
he is coming back, although I doubt a bit) but his H2O
suite can produce Component Pascal headers. H2O should
- on the other side - be integrated into the Swig project
(where there is already something for Modula-3), which is
able to autogenerate wrapper routines around C constructs,
which do not have any correspondence in CP (like structs,
i.e. RECORDs as function results, which must be converted
to heap objects using the CP garbage-collected memory
allocation routines.

To allow for collaborative development, the binary
odc format should be translated to an ASCII format
for CVS (sourceforge ?) storage. A viable way would
be XML (and that should be possible according to
Cuno Pfister, who had the idea, but OMiSys did not
have a customer who needed it, or did that change?),
but that needs also work ...

I do not want to detail on the points below,
but I second, what Wojtek says here:
>
> Can this goal be achieved? I believe it can, but not without work,
> planning, and coordination. Such things do not happen just by
> themselves.
> Who is interested in such an effort? Current BB user community seems
> to be short on manpower and programming expertise. We are mostly
> users rather than system programmers. There are a few professional
> programmers and computer scientists around, but not that
> many. In order

[...]

> no matter how good the idea is in principle. There needs to be
> a support group in place. Enthusiasm will not do the trick
> by itself.
>

[...]

> I think that the fortcoming source release may or may not lead
> to a breakthrough, depending on us.
>

regards

--
	Bernhard Treutwein, IuK, Ref. III A 3
	Bernhard.Treutwein(at)verwaltung uni-muenchen de
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Received on Wed Jun 30 2004 - 09:18:09 UTC