shaddock%mcnc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (09/09/85)
From: Mike Shaddock <rti-sel!shaddock%mcnc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
I am thinking about porting GNUEmacs to a Gould 9050. Has anyone out
there done this yet? I can forsee 3 major problems about doing this
port:
(1) Use of alloca: alloca doesn't work on a Gould, and as I
understand it, never will unless the subroutine linkage
is changed, since you are not allowed to mess with the
stack pointer. Has anyone attempted to remove the use of
alloca from GNUEmacs? I know RMS says that it's hopeless,
but I would like to know if anyone has looked into it.
(2) Changes to crt0: I don't as yet know how much of a problem
this will be, but I know that the Gould's crt0 is written in
assembly language, and I don't understand what RMS is doing
in the crt0 for GNUEmacs. This probably isn't a real problem.
(3) Unexec: this could also pose almost as big a problem as
alloca. Does anyone know of an unexec for the Gould?
In general, it looks like GNUEmacs could be very hard to port to any
system, I'm surprised that as many people have it working as they do.
GNUEmacs itself is very nice, but after being involved in writing a cad
system that runs under Unix and VMS, I am distressed at there being so
many portability problems with GNUEmacs.