Distractions

Well, here we go again… instead of working on one thing, something else gets in the way and is way to interesting to not play around with. In this case it all started with the ancient Norcroft compiler crashing and taking MPW with it, just because I created some more complex class structures. So why not use something else instead? Xcode is a half decent IDE, there is a readymade ARM cross compiler for Mac OS X, and the NTK and NCT formats are also all available, e.g. on UNNA. Currently, there are only two things missing for bringing C++ programming for the Newton to this millenium: getting the runtime functions into a stub library, and duming the ELF image the GNU compiler produces into an NSOF formatted file. The runtime library is in principle easy to build, it just requires mapping the function names from the GCC mangled format to the Norcroft format which can be extracted from the debugger images. I guess there’s a way to do that automatically, but for now, I just add each undefined external function manually to the stub library. Some other smaller issues are exception handling and constructors, but I’ll get to that once the first module loads properly.