Status of BeOS x86 kaffe

[Chris Nash]

Hi folks,

Thanks to everyone for the update on the state of BeKaffe or Kaffe for 
BeOS. Thanks particularly to Edouard for the JIT3 enabling, I was 
tempted to symlink jit-md.h to jit3-md.h but never got around to trying 
it.

>I wrote the beos-native threading layer, and was affiliated
>with the BeKaffe group

It's good to hear that people are still around - I was a bit afraid the 
effort had been utterly deserted, but Duncan McQueen tells me it would 
not be too much to reintegrate the Kaffe/BeKaffe trees, one way or the 
other - I wasn't sure though whether BeKaffe had been permanently 
splintered off from the kaffe tree for any reason such as cleanroom. 
I'd like to contribute to either tree but wasn't going to take on 
another solo effort :)

>The last time I worked with Kaffe, which was over a year ago, libtool
>was giving me a lot of grief with shared objects.  I'd be happy to
>give things another shot, once I reassemble my BeOS development box.

*smiles* I think libtool has changed a lot since then, and while the 
BeOS support still is far from final, it's not too far off. You *can* 
however convince libtool to generate shared libraries (even with 
external symbols) for BeOS with very little effort, but you still need 
to explicitly add -l's for shared library dependencies to the libtool 
link line. If I remember this rightly, libtool used to require that 
anyway, but nobody seems to bother, I guess since neither static 
libraries nor Linux-like ld.so need it. (Perhaps someone knows for sure 
whether this is still benign - i.e. completely ignored - for everything 
else, and if so, there'd be no harm adding the -l's to the libtool link 
lines in the makefile templates).

Chris