Tuesday, February 21, 2017

February 21, 2017

pLisp has been ported to OS X. This was surprisingly straightforward, for a couple of reasons: a) OS X, once the necessary bits are set up (mainly HomeBrew and jhbuild), is sufficiently close to Linux--at least for me--to make the porting a breeze and b) all the earlier hard work of migrating pLisp to autotools finally paid for itself.

The main gotcha for me was adding missing function declarations (this is probably an artifact of using a higher version of gcc in the Mac system, and not because of some inherently OS X thing). After spending a significant part of the porting effort for this, the key takeaway for me is to not ignore compiler warnings. This will save you  a buttload of trouble, trying to wade your way through seemingly unrelated runtime errors (while it's easy to preach, I'm still guilty of this sin, as a compile of the pLisp code base will readily demonstrate).