Perhaps surprising, and certainly not obvious to many people, is that it’s been possible to develop RISC OS programs under Windows for a long time. Historically, ARM’s SDK environment was able to generate RISC OS binaries, although that support was removed some time ago. More recently (but has still been true for a number of years), it’s been possible to build RISC OS programs using GCCSDK under Cygwin – although bugs in the version of the compiler packaged with it did make that problematic earlier this year.
Cross platform development: Building RISC OS Programs on Windows
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Possible is one thing; Practical is likely entirely another story.
Given that the author has produced a *lot* of Unix ports for RISC OS over the last three years on exactly such a set-up, I suspect that ‘practical’ is answered by example.
I used to be a big RISC OS zealot, until a couple of years ago when I realised that both my machines had been totally eclipsed by Linux and even WinXP.
There just aren’t any killer apps anymore, the hardware is under spec and over priced, the OS is being forked all over the place, whilst still not adding anything new…..
The only hope RISC OS has is under emulation on superior hardware, but even then, there just aren’t the apps anymore (except maybe Artworks2).
And this isn’t really cross-platform development, it’s using Windows/Linux with gcc to build RISC OS binaries, it’s not true cross-platform where you could RUN those binaries on Windows/Linux/Mac, and you can’t use a nice IDE like VisualStudio to make WIMP apps.
… why you need a seperate build of gcc to cross compile for risc (or any other platform). Why can’t you have 1 gcc binary and specify a different cpu/architecture with the command line (–target=risc)? Gcc itself is just a front end for 20 or so other programs (preprocessor, various compilers, assembler, linker, etc).
Wha? Forked? Theres RISCOS Select/4.x and RISC os5. thats it.
Whether or not it’s “practical” depends precisely upon your circumstances and what tools you like to use. Moreover, and what the article states, is that it makes things possible that simply aren’t at all under RISC OS natively. It’s a bit of a silly thing to say.
The distinction about it not being proper cross platform development is pretty silly too. It simply means that you’re building binaries on something other than the target system, and it’s hardly alone in this respect. In any case, you could fire up one of the Emulators.
GCC backends – well, for starters, the platform is “RISC OS”, not “risc”, and secondly, having a GCC backend for ever target that it supports would make GCC much more massive than it already is, and include code most people would never use.
So what does apparently happen?
There’s windows, let’s put an emulation layer on top of that called Cygwin to be able to run unix/linux products and in that environment run a cross compile for risc os?
Is it not more practical to have a dual boot dev machine or a little spare box with linux or bsd to do the trick? You’re rid of the emulation layer (so performance is up). And then run the cross compile(s). Life would be better I’d think.
Why cripple yourself using the setup on Windows with Cygwin? You’re already doing a non trivial task of crosscompilation so why lose extra performance and jump thru extra Cygwin hoops? I don’t get it. But I run linux so it’s your choice and if you feel happy with it, just continue as you wish.
Sincerely, Erick
You’ve completely missed the point of the article of course – presumably because you only made passing attempt to read it, and assuming everyone is in your situation.
Yes, of course running a real Unix and doing all this is much better; that’s precisely how the system was developed, and how I used it.
The point is to easily allow people who already have access to Windows (which is certainly a large number) and who can’t/won’t install Linux to run this stuff, and also to demonstrate how easily it can be done on _any_ Unix system.
The point I’m especially missing is why someone who is so happy with Windows that he/she won’t boot anything else would do cross compilations for RISC OS. Almost all of these people won’t use RISC OS either, they’ll use Windows for writing the business app also (Poor guys).
E.