On Sun, 2024-10-27 at 13:49 +1100, Finn Thain wrote: > I think that's overstating the case. Alternatives to rust are available > and will be for the foreseeable future. Most notably, > https://safecpp.org/draft.html
It's not just about Rust: > https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/alignment-meme.jpg > I agree with your sentiment though, in that rust generally gets a lot of > funding and hype. Even if the Rust Foundation doesn't care about > supporting the backend for m68k, there is still a way for non-commercially > viable platforms to collaborate. In particular, > https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/RustFrontEnd This is getting off-topic. > > > Absent the right conditions, perhaps it is best focus limited porter and > > > developer effort on patching only those packages that are really required. > > > > I tried my hand at Qt5. About 20 man-hours in I essentially gave up, > > and that was without even getting to something I could put to a > > compile and runtime test. > > > > I take your point about the amount of effort required (and the lack of > resources). The answer may be to share the work better by enabling more > collaboration. The "collaboration" currently means me doing 100% of the Debian/m68k work. > It appears that NetBSD/m68k has naturally aligned ints. Perhaps you could > look at adding kernel support for their ABI, and get access to Qt and LLVM > that way, without impacting the existing ABI and its ecosystem. What ecosystem? Do you honestly care that any hobbyist cares about having to reinstall their retro computers? > BTW, it has long annoyed me that two different 68k Mac bootloaders exist, > one each for Linux and NetBSD, which are duplicated effort, and have > different sets of bugs. To my mind, this is another good opportunity to > collaborate and avoid wasted developer effort (perhaps by dual licensing). Again off-topic. > > “Natural” alignment of data types has essentially become a requirement > > these days, and m68k is the only true outlyer (i386 could in theory, but > > the Unix psABI designers were sensible enough to not do it). > > > > I expect alignment assumptions like that will end up putting more > platforms in the same predicament in future. "Natural" alignment is > meaningless in the context of portable data structures, as they exist > without reference to any particular integer unit. It is because your > struct patches improve portability that I'd expect those patches to remain > acceptable upstream. > > Q. What is the size of this struct, assuming baa.b is naturally aligned? > > struct baa { > int a; > long long b; > }; We're dealing with today's software and not something that exists in 50 years. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
