Re: About openoffice linux/mips porting

[Thiemo Seufer <ths@networkno.de>]

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.


Thiemo