platforms <- page (

links:
www.eyestep.org
orange at sourceforge

hosted by:

orange2c and its accompanying libraries are intended to be as platform independant as possible. portability of course is limited by the approach to compile orange source code to C. even though C is a fairly widely available language, the diversity in system runtime libraries and language feature sets is stunning. therefore both the compiler and the base libraries are written with portability in mind. neverthelesse the degree of portability depends on a number of facts:

both the compiler and the (orange) runtime requires a fully working garbage collector. the system is developed using the hans boehm conservative garbage collector library which is a transparent replacement for the standard C malloc/free function set, and seems to be fairly stable. even if this library is available on a wide range of platforms, the non-availability prevends portability of the compiler and libraries in the moment.

the (orange) runtime libraries requires a working threading subsystem. due to the diversity of different thread approachs on various operating systems, the language runtime kernel needs an special implementation for every new thread approach. only pthread support is available by now.

Supported (tested) platforms and known issues

the (current) release (0.4.0) has been build and tested on following systems:

Linux Debian 2.2 (x86)

main development platform is linux debian 2.2 (x86). running and compiling on this platforms should be straightforward. compiling and running on other linux/x86 distributions should raise no special problems. boehm's garbage collector libraries is available pre-compiled and pre-packaged on most distributions.

FreeBSD 4.4 and 4.5-STABLE (x86)

compiling and running both compiler and library raise no problemm, but one has to use GNU make instead of the native make utility. either versions 5.3 and 6.0 of boehm's garbage collector library has been tested, however it seems that thread support is limited in the gc, as the gc's documentation tells.

SunOS 5.8 (sparc) / Solaris 2.8

Compiling and running tools and libraries is straightforward. boehm's garbage collector version 6.0 has been tested.

BeOS 5 (x86)

Earlier versions used to compile and run under this platform, but since thread support has been added to the runtime kernel, the current kernel code doesn't compile. boehm's garbage collector is no prolem though.