Overview

gcc is my first attempt at a proper Macintosh Application conforming
to the Human Interface Guidelines. Therefore you may want to give up
at this point because it is bound to be full of bugs. However if you
are curious about how your mac works read on.

Furthermore this is only a demo. Lots of features that a proper
application would have such as various preferences and options,
a scripting window, automatic builds etc. are not present.

Don't contact me for the full version, there isn't one.

Nevertheless it is possible to produce a fully functional, stand-alone
mac application from your own C source code. You may have some
example apps generated by this compiler in the same archive as you
got what you are reading. They aren't fancy, but it gives you an idea 
of what you can do, with a little effort.

This program is not a replacement for THINK-C or MPW. Those are
commercial products which cost big bucks (especially if you install
on lots of machines). This program on the other hand is Postcardware
This means if you like this program, send me a postcard.
If you don't like this program, you can send me (polite!) email to
jrrk@uk.co.camcon to say why not, and you may get some help,
or just a disclaimer.

The address to send postcards is:

Jonathan Kimmitt
4 Moyne Close
Cambridge
CB4 2TA
ENGLAND

For your own protection, you should avoid
using this program for any commercial purpose. Most commercial
QA departments require that supported software be used for
developing commercial software. This software comes with no warranty.

On the other hand this program does offer some features that some
other compilers lack. The compiler diagnostic messages are, in some
cases, superior, and the programmer has the ease of use of a full
32-bit development environment, even on 68000 machines. Global
common segments are supported

This is made possible by the use of GNU development tools,
which are designed specifically for use in a 32-bit environment. The
penalty for this ease of use is that the entire program text needs to be
loaded and locked in memory at program startup, which is not
de-rigeur  as far as Inside Macintosh is concerned. However a modern
Macintosh with typically 8MB of memory and virtual capability in my
view should not be stuck with 32K segments.

This program is based on and offers similar functionality to the gcc1.37
plug-in for MPW. However various changes have been made to allow
operation in an class library environment, and to make the output format
compatible with GNU assembler (GAS). You can still see the MPW
style assembly language however, which is useful for learning about C
and 680X0 assembly language.

By now you are probably keen to see whether these claims are really true,
so select one of the other sections on the left.