Out of Cheese

Ted Neward talks about the Rotor BOF held at Microsoft’s PDC last night and mentions the challenge of getting Rotor to work on Panther. For what it’s worth, the FreeBSD 5 connection doesn’t really make much of a difference in updating Rotor for Panther. Rotor’s BSD layer — the PAL — already works. The biggest problem with Panther (and with moving Rotor to any new OS release) is the change in compilers and low-level system libraries.

I believe I’ve fixed most of these problems, but I’m having serious trouble with precompiled headers. I’m not sure that Rotor’s precompiled header support, which is specific to GCC 3.1’s PFE on Jaguar and not supported anywhere else, can be updated for GCC 3.3’s PCH. I may just change Rotor to build without precompiled headers on Panther as a way of getting things working quickly. It’ll build a lot slower, but I’m not sure when I’ll have time to get PCH to work.