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As somebody who maintains a fork of MINIX2, just for private pleasure, I know the limitations of ACK. In the end, you either need gcc or clang if you want to co
by phicoh 6y ago
As somebody who maintains a fork of MINIX2, just for private pleasure, I know the limitations of ACK. In the end, you either need gcc or clang if you want to compile modern source code.
I doubt that clang would be reason not to volunteer for MINIX3. That said, I personally don't like what MINIX3 has become.
In the end, if you want to have a small, volunteer-based software project, you need somebody with a vision and who is also able to contribute quite a lot of time to the project (and possibily also quite a bit of resources).
The MINIX3 didn't have such a person in the community so the transition from paid developers to a community supported project failed.
- anthk 6y agoWould tcc or pcc work?
- boricj 6y agoIt would've provided C99, but these days an operating system needs among other things a proper C++ compiler to support running modern software. Besides, the switch to NetBSD userland also brought build.sh and easy cross-compiling, which was a huge benefit for programmers. As for the MINIX2 fork I assume it's Minix-vmd. MINIX didn't switch to ELF before the 3.2.0 release, so you either need a toolchain that can output the traditional a.out file format or add ELF support to MINIX2. Not impossible, but probably more work than maintaining a MINIX2 fork for private pleasure warrants.
- phicoh 6y agoIt is indeed Minix-vmd. The current toolchain is way too old. Most of the software I want to run is written in C, often C89, or C99. So it doesn't cause a lot of issues at the the moment. I think adding minimal ELF support would not be a lot of work.
- boricj 6y agoIndeed, if you stick to ET_EXEC then it's only marginally more complex than a.out. I doubt it would take more than 150 lines of code to pull it off and it's a much saner executable file format for the 21st century. I'm assuming there's no dynamic linking support here and that you only care for a basic ELF loader. Do you have pointers to online resources on Minix-vmd and a public source tree repository somewhere? minix-vmd.org seems down... No guarantees, but I do seem to be the type that does random drive-by contributions to open-source software.
- phicoh 6y agoAh, it's sad that minix-vmd.org is down. It is not maintained by me, but I'll see if it can be revived. That said, the sources on minix-vmd.org are quite old. It seems that last time I put something online is also already awhile ago: http://stereo.hq.phicoh.net/Minix-vmd/images/ http://stereo.hq.phicoh.net/Minix-vmd/images/