[Aldor-l] autoconf and Aldor

[Bill Page]

Aldor Developers,

Another issue that was discussed during the recent Aldor workshop was
the current Aldor build system. Stephen Watt presented an in-depth
walkthru of the Aldor source code tree and it various parts. (I have
this presentation in recorded audio format. If anyone who wasn't at
the workshop is interested to hear it or if you would like to review
it again, with Stephen's permission I am willing to upload it to the
Aldor Wiki .)

In particular Stephen described how the build process proceeds in two
stages: first building the tools from the /tools subdirectory based on
details of the current platform, then using these tools to build the
compiler in the /src subdirectory and the essential libraries in the
/lib directory. This is of course very different than the autoconf
style make that is common in gnu open source projects. But the first
stage of the build does act something like the configure step that
usually precedes make.

A quick review of the /tools directory suggests that it contains a lot
of code for possible platforms that are by now quite obsolete. Plus it
may not be sufficiently sensitive to the subtle differences between
modern Linux, Solaris and other Unix/bsd platforms. At the workshop
David Casperson described his work on the updated build system of MAC
OSX.

In my opinion updating the Aldor build system to use autoconf style
make files (such as was done in the build-improvements branch for the
Axiom project by Gaby Dos Reis) would be a worthwhile project. Using
autoconf makes it possible to build Axiom on a much wider range of
platforms than was possible with the original build system.  I would
be glad to work with anyone who is interested in doing similar work
for Aldor.

Regards,
Bill Page.