This note is about configuring GCC on macOS so that your built compiler can be used independently of which Software Development Kit (SDK) is installed.
This is with Word 2019 for Mac.
Why am I using Word, anyway? - because LibreOffice has stopped working with our membership database in SQLite, and wasn’t working at all well with a CSV export. Oh, and Word doesn’t work with SQLite either.
I managed to create a Word template by careful editing of the LibreOffice version; painful to have to work with CSVs, but better than filling in 100 membership letters by hand (most of our members have email, so a Python script using email.mime, smtplib, sqlite3 etc worked for them, leaving the diehards ...)
OK, the organisation has a new chair, time to update the template.
Where is it? Turns out, ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/Templates. Well done, Microsoft.
And then, the challenge is to find a way of editing the template. Whatever I try, whatever tips I follow on the net, all I can do is edit a document based on the template, which is not what I need to happen!
I would look into PDFs via fpdf2, but I should only have another year in this post and the next person might have an issue with that. (The same applies to using SQLite, of course. Hmm.)
This is a note about preparing a pull request (PR) for a Github repository. As much as anything, it’s to stop me having to page back through my lab notebook to find out how I did it last time …
Recently, on the Gitter Ada Programming Language lobby, there have been discussions on cross-compiling for Cortex M micro-controllers, specifically the BBC micro:bit, using the Raspberry Pi.
TL;DR: it's not going to be easy, unfortunately. Maybe later (or earlier?) Raspbian releases will help.
This post is based on the README from the corresponding Github repository.
That repository attempts to cope with expected changes in Apple’s approach to software development kits, specifically where to find the system headers (you’d expect /usr/include).
This is a rather self-satisfied document, written in the mid-1990’s, which may still have some relevance.
Coding Guide
Purpose and Scope
While it is hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear (to create good code from a bad design), it is all too easy to do the reverse.
The principle that clear, readable, understandable source text eases program evolution, adaptation, and maintenance is not dependent on the programming language in which the text is written. The purpose of this document is to indicate those language-independent techniques which can help you to produce source text with these qualities.
After you've installed Xcode (or, my preference, the Command Line
Tools via xcode-select -install) so that you can install and
use GNAT, you may expect to be able to compile C code too.
Mojave may surprise you with
$ gcc casing.c -o casing
casing.c:1:10: fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
1 | #include <stdio.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
The reason, according
to this
question and its answers, is that Apple's developer tools, in
particular the clang compiler, know where to find the include
files under /Library/Developer; GCC doesn't (I'm sure it
could be made to, but ...) and so we have to add an extra step to
install them in the normal place:
$ sudo installer -pkg /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg -target /
Password:
installer: Package name is macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14
installer: Installing at base path /
installer: The install was successful.
You may need to repeat this after macOS or Command Line Tools (or
Xcode) updates.
Apple's software development tools are based on LLVM, and Apple
don't seem to feel it necessary to keep GCC and friends up to date
with changes in the Apple tools or security policies.
GDB has been particularly affected by this. You can see why a tool
which is capable of interacting with running programs would have to be
treated with caution.
This note is about problems with VMWare shared drives failing to mount.
My previous setup was VMWare Fusion 8 and Debian 8 (jessie), with the VMWare-recommended open-vm-tools. After upgrading to VMWare Fusion 10 and Debian 9 (stretch), the shared folder (~) on the Mac was no longer visible from Debian (~/mac, a symbolic link to /mnt/hgfs).
After looking here, I added this line to /etc/fstab:
In GNAT, the secondary stack is a construct used with indeterminate types. For example, if a function returns a String, it isn't possible for the caller to determine how much space to reserve for the result: instead, the called function allocates the amount of space required on the secondary stack, and on return the caller determines how much space to allocate on the normal (primary) stack, and pops the function's result from the secondary stack to there.
This note discusses how the secondary stack is managed in Cortex GNAT RTS for FSF GCC and GNAT Community Edition (was GNAT GPL).
I wanted to get a dependency graph for a project, and found DePlo (Dependency Plotter). Great stuff, last updated in 2012 but still works with FSF GCC 8.0.1!
Fosstodon @adaprogrammers
