March 13, 2008 — nu, iphone, linux
The Nu git repository now contains all the source code and related build tools to build Nu for Linux and the iPhone. iPhone support is currently for the simulator only, and so far, I have only tested Linux support on Ubuntu 7.10 running in VMware Fusion.
While there’s a lot of interest in the iPhone, the Nu Linux support is what has me the most excited.
Details are on Programming Nu.
Lately I have been working on a version of Nu that I have modified to run on Linux. For now, it’s running on Ubuntu (Server 7.10), but other distributions can be easily supported. As you might imagine, there are several things that make this interesting.
Here’s an update on my port of Nu to Linux.
So far I’ve been running on Ubuntu 7.10 in VMware and using debuggable versions of libobjc and libFoundation that I built from source. Nu also depends on libffi, and on Linux it uses the “stock” libffi that Ubuntu and Debian users can install with apt-get.
I have an experimental Debian package that contains a Nu interpreter built for Debian Etch (4.0). This Nu is built to use the GNU Objective-C runtime and GNUstep-base, the GNUstep open-source equivalent of Apple’s Foundation classes.
With GNUstep support, “NuFound” (aka libFoundation) support is dropped. GNUstep is actively maintained and adds at least one very important feature (UTF-8 support) that is missing in libFoundation.
All source code changes for this build are now in my Nu github repository and I will soon also add a nuke task to build the Debian package.
Please be aware that this is very new. So far it has only been tested in a VMware image, but because it is based completely on stock Debian components, I think it will hold up well.
A link and more details are below.
