[coldfire-gnu-discuss] Objective-C

[Nathan Sidwell]

Andre,
> I see from the CodeSourcery site that you've got G++ compilers -- are 
> these substantially modified(cut-down) or enhanced from GCC? I've also 
> been through the GCC project site and found that your staff contribute 
> much to GCC and are largely responsible for improved ColdFire support in 
> GCC which is just WONDERFUL!

Thank you :)  The toolchains we provide have the ColdFire patches ported to 
stable GCC branches (4.1 is the current release, and 4.2 is arriving shortly). 
Mainline FSF has the ColdFire changes and those will work their way into 4.3. 
In addition, we validate the binaries we provided by building them in a 
controlled environment and running the testsuites on a variety of target boards.

> I'm a Mac SW engineer and have many years of ObjC experience, and many 
> Mb of source code, some of which I'd like to reuse in an embedded 
> project I'm working on. I'd like to see a ColdFire development and debug 
> environment on Mac OS X using XCode if possible, Eclipse if necessary. 
> If successful it could be a boon to Mac developers who are keen on 
> ColdFire and want a "mainstream" embedded solution without giving up 
> their Macs.

The SourceryG++ product includes Eclipse integration.  We're not currently 
supporting Mac as a host system, but would consider it if there was demand.

> I'd like to get your opinion of what might be involved in making this 
> happen. I think building a toolchain should be quite doable based on 
> what I've read at the GCC site and your comments this morning. But 
> putting it all together with hardware (I'm thinking a NetBurner 5282 
> based module) and actually getting it to work could be
> something I'm not prepared to do. I certainly am prepared to spend 
> significant time on this, but don't want to "reinvent the wheel."

It depends where you think your strengths are and what you want to spend your 
time on.  Do you want to develop and validate a toolchain, or do you want to 
write programs :)

nathan

-- 
Nathan Sidwell    ::   http://www.codesourcery.com   ::         CodeSourcery
nathan at codesourcery.com    ::     http://www.planetfall.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk