9fe01e692e
First, change the port so that it builds a much smaller subset of the SRC distribution. This eliminates the enormous swap space requirements of the earlier port, greatly reduces the footprint of the installed tree, and cuts the size of the package in half. Second, include many important new patches. Among them is a slightly modified version of phkmalloc that is thread-safe for Modula-3. It eradicates some rare and baffling core dumps that cropped up from time to time in the previous version of the port. The Modula-3 runtime itself is careful to use mutual exclusion around calls to malloc. But there remained some sneaky backdoor paths into it from external libraries. Confession: In the original version of the Modula-3 port, I used a major version number of 353 for the shared libraries, to correspond with the SRC version number 3.5.3. That was a dumb move -- I should have used 1. The current update is incompatible at the shared library level, requiring me to increment the major version number to 354, even though this is still based on SRC release 3.5.3. This is bound to confuse some folks, unfortunately. I weighed a number of alternatives, such as (a) cheating and going back to 1, and (b) using a 4-digit major version such as 3531. But in the end I decided that 354 would be the best solution, even though it's confusing.
48 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
48 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
This is a port of Modula-3 release 3.5.3, from DEC Systems Research
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Center. Modula-3 is a modern compiled programming language designed
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for systems programming as well as large applications. Some notable
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features include:
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* A clean type system with good support for object-oriented
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programming.
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* A powerful module system.
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* Lightweight threads, fully integrated into the language and all of
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the libraries.
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* Generics.
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* Exceptions.
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* Automatic storage management by a multithreaded, incremental,
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generational garbage collector.
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* Guaranteed type safety, plus the ability to confine unsafe code
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behind safe interfaces.
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* Elegance and simplicity, even compared with less powerful
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languages such as C++ and Ada.
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* Ease of integration with existing C libraries.
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* A huge collection of runtime libraries, providing:
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- Text manipulation.
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- Generic containers (lists, sequences, tables, etc.).
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- Atoms and symbolic expressions.
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- An extensible stream I/O system.
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- Persistent objects.
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- Operating system interfaces.
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- Networking.
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- Very nice object-oriented graphics facilities, and some
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convenient tools for building GUIs.
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* A convenient browser.
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A wealth of information about Modula-3 can be found at:
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http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/modula-3/html/home.html
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This port includes patches for a number of bugs found since the
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release of DEC SRC's version 3.5.3. To save space and time, only
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the most commonly-used subset of the DEC distribution is built and
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installed by this port. That includes the standard libraries and
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the graphics packages, but not the (huge) separate projects such
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as netobj, zeus, obliq, and visual obliq.
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NOTE: Despite appearances to the contrary, the shared library
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version numbers are not related to the version number of the DEC
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SRC release.
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-- John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
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