Using A/UX to build MacOS applications

[Dan Gerson]

I'd like to be able to use A/UX as a programming environment for building standard
(non-A/UX) MacOS applications.  Basically, I want to be able to use Emacs, g++, etc.
instead of the limited development choices available under the MacOS.

According to the 1.1 documentation (yes, I'm running 2.0.1 but I never bought a
new doc set), the only apparent way to do this is for me to use GNU tools or
whatever to write and debug the program under A/UX, and then to port the sources
to the Mac, and run a MacOS compiler to generate the executable.

I'd prefer to be able to use g++ etc. directly.  One reason is that there is not
a g++ which runs under MacOS.  Of course, I will be writing everything in a AT&T
C++ 2.0 conformant subset anyway, so I could possibly port the code to Zortech
C++ or whatever.  But that would preclude me from using any useful Unix
libraries which might just happen to work under MacOS (that is, if they don't
make any system calls - at least none that I don't supply my own version of.
For example, lex and yacc should work ok when I define yyinput etc.).

I understand that the problem is that the A/UX compilers will be generating
AppleDouble files, where the data file is a COFF format executable.  But this
raises two questions:

1) Is there a way to translate COFF into CODE resources?  If there isn't, is
there any real reason why I couldn't write such a beast?

2) Even if I could translate COFF to a MacOS-style AppleDouble or AppleSingle,
is it really worth it anyway?  If I can use libg++, yacc, lex, etc., it might
be.  But will the linked images be usable under MacOS anyway?  Can I simply
redefine malloc etc., or is the problem much more pervasive?  I can of course
conditionalize the few calls which might require the Mactoolbox glue routines -
but I don't expect to have many modules which actually require the code to be
different between A/UX and the MacOS.

Any ideas?  Just give up and buy Zortech C++ (if it is available and is at least
2.0 conformant, although I prefer 2.1).
--

Dan Gerson					gerson at parc.xerox.com
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center			415-494-4745
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA