Status

I am currently (November 2012) working on the structure of the port.  This means I'm experimenting with different build options, learning their effects, and looking at other ports to see how they have solved things.  It also means I'm not really adding any substantial pieces of code yet.  I'm loosely following a 4D type s/w development methodology, where I'm mostly in the Design stage at the moment.  Most of the code I do add is centered around prototyping and testing.

A couple of examples of design decisions that need to be pinned down early:

• POSIX Layer
  Utility functions and class methods in wxWidgets are loosely based on a POSIX type structure.  This means that some sort of POSIX-like layer is inevitable.  AmigaOS isn't POSIX compliant, but it has most of the features from POSIX, though sometimes implemented in a different way.  Amiga also adds some things that don't exist in POSIX, the file deletion protection bit being one of them.  Volumes and assigns are two other basic concepts that have no direct match in POSIX.  How and where to map from POSIX to AmigaOS type API's does require a little bit of design.
• Network Layer
  BSD sockets is the de facto standard for pretty much all networking code (these days) on just about any platform.  So wxWidgets uses a sockets type API for networking and AmigaOS provides sockets type API's.  If it only stopped there!!  Traditionally, AmigaOS has had some variations on network API's, and while they are all similar to sockets, they are also not completely drop-in compatible.  Not with BSD sockets and not with each other.  What type of networking SDK is delivered with different compilers is also inconsistent.  Design decisions in this area are mainly centered on which compilers and network packages to support.  Not so difficult for AmigaOS 4, but when considering OS3, AROS and Morhphos there are some things to plan for.

A design principle I'm following is to modify common sections of wxWidgets code as little as possible.  This is a natural consequence of trying to get this port into the main distribution as quickly as possible.  This does have some design consequences but most of the decisions are fairly straightforward.  I could litter the wxWidgets code with #ifdef's for AmigaOS, but I will try to reduce that to a minimum.  This does make initial progress slightly slower, but it makes future code maintenance a lot simpler, so I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

For basic testing I'm using a (modified) version of gcc and cross-compiling from Linux.  I'm more or less treating the Amiga as an embedded system, and I've moved all parts of the edit-compile-test cycle to a single non-native environment.  That's why you see UAE, m68k and OS3 below, but I've taken some steps to ensure that what I'm testing is also relevant on a native ppc box.

Anyway, just to show a little bit of progress I'm including the basic sequence used to build a minimal library and a screenshot of running a trivial shell program.  It doesn't really prove anything other than having a working tool chain.  This would be trivial for most software projects, but for wxWidgets there's actually a fair bit of work even to get to this point.  The build system is very elaborate and uses special tools, configuration files and scripts.  For a smaller port I might make different decisions, but wxWidgets is a package with 1.3 million lines of C++ code -- quite possibly larger than all of AmigaOS itself.  Making sure that I get a tool chain and build system that is mostly in line with what wxWidgets expects makes many other things a lot easier. Fortunately, once you get across the initial hurdle, wxWidgets is a pretty clever piece of code!


andreas@fenix-ubuntu ~/src/wxWidgets/build/amiga
$ ../../configure --host=m68k-amigaos --disable-gui --disable-all-features --disable-shared --disable-sockets

...

Configured wxWidgets 2.9.4 for `m68k-unknown-amigaos'

  Which GUI toolkit should wxWidgets use?                 base only
  Should wxWidgets be compiled into single library?       no
  Should wxWidgets be linked as a shared library?         no
  Should wxWidgets support Unicode?                       no
  What level of wxWidgets compatibility should be enabled?
                                       wxWidgets 2.6      no
                                       wxWidgets 2.8      yes
  Which libraries should wxWidgets use?
                                       STL                no
                                       jpeg               none
                                       png                none
                                       regex              no
                                       tiff               none
                                       zlib               no
                                       expat              no
                                       libmspack          no
                                       sdl                no


andreas@fenix-ubuntu ~/src/wxWidgets/build/amiga
$ make 2>&1 | tee make.log

...

andreas@fenix-ubuntu /build/amiga/tc-test/wx
$ cat wxhello.cpp

#include <wx/wx.h>
#include <wx/wxcrt.h>
#include <wx/string.h>

int main(void)
{
    wxPuts("Hello, wxWidgets!");

    return 0;
}

andreas@fenix-ubuntu /build/amiga/tc-test/wx
$ m68k-amigaos-g++ -c -o wxhello.o wxhello.cpp `~/src/wxWidgets/build/amiga/wx-config --cxxflags`

andreas@fenix-ubuntu /build/amiga/tc-test/wx
$ m68k-amigaos-g++ -Wl,-allow-multiple-definition -o wxhello wxhello.o `~/src/wxWidgets/build/amiga/wx-config --libs`