[libdispatch-dev] Updates regarding the status of libdispatch on Windows

[Kevin Van Vechten]

On May 5, 2011, at 10:31 AM, Marius Zwicker wrote:

> I am very glad to report good news on the topic libdispatch on windows.
> 
> Yesterday we managed to eradicate the last obvious bugs and all tests
> and can now completely build and run libdispatch by using MSVC (Visual
> Studio 2010) on windows. All tests seem to pass or fail the same way
> they currently do on Linux, so at least we have reached feature parity
> ;) - Please see the test results attached [1], the responsible code can
> be found at http://opensource.mlba-team.de/svn/xdispatch/tags/0.4/ (see
> the core folder for the libdispatch implementation).

Congrats! That's a great milestone.

> The big question to raise now is wether merging back to macosforge.org
> is possible or not. We had to change a lot of the sources and some of
> the changes do not really contribute to the maintainability of the code,
> e.g. MSVC still does not support named intializers in structs.
> Additionally I split queue.c into several subfiles, such as debug.c and
> so on, to make the different implementations for the different platforms
> easier to find. As such it will be quite difficult to provide small
> patches instead of one or two bigger ones. And there is DrPizza/Peter's
> port as well, although I do not know how much of his work is tested.
> 
> What do you think about it?

I think we all share the goal of wanting the cross platform support to be merged back into the Mac OS Forge trunk. As you point out the main obstacles of merging this work as well as some work we have done internally at Apple has more to do with the organization of the source files and less to do with any technical hurdles. (We have some platform independent enhancements and changes that we expect to merge into the tree some point soon.)

At the moment I think the right approach is to make sure everyone with patches lets the list know (you all have been doing an excellent job in that regard) and we can start individual discussions about how to best merge them. I'll have my team start preparing a description of the organizational changes we've made as well. Once we have a clearer picture of all the moving parts we can move forward.

Thanks!

Kevin