Re: About openoffice linux/mips porting

[David Daney <ddaney@avtrex.com>]

Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> Fuxin Zhang wrote:
>> Maciej W. Rozycki ??????:
>>> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Fuxin Zhang wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>> It is available at
>>>> http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=81482, any comments are
>>>> welcome.
>>>> Have an official openoffice for linux/mips might be a good thing.
> 
> A quick glance revealed already several bugs. (alignment issues, ULH for
> laoding signed shorts, etc.)
> 
>>>  Hmm, why would anyone need to have asm snippets in a document processing 
>>> suite?  And it looks like the bits are ABI-dependent, so at least three 
>>> variations (if the changes are endianness-safe) would be required to 
>>> handle all the ABIs that we support.
>>>   
>> Openoffice wants to be able to interact with plugins written in many 
>> languages, instead of writting a module for each possible combination it 
>> chooses the so called bridge: every language interact with a common middle 
>> language.
> 
> So we have now foreign function interfaces for at least OpenOffice, Mozilla,
> Clisp and GCC's libffi. libffi recently got support for N32/N64 ABIs, and
> is the only solution which isn't bound to a specific application (as long
> as GCC is used).
> 
> Using libffi from Openoffice looks like the best long-term approach 
> to me.

I assume you mean 'Using libffi in...'.  I would tend to agree, but I am 
a bit biased toward libffi.

FWIW, GCC's libffi gets full n32/n64 support in version 4.3 (which has 
not been released yet)  The libffi part seems quite stable though, so 
you could start experimenting with it now I suppose...


David Daney