GCCSDK

Introduction

The riscos.info GCCSDK is really two closely related sub-projects - GCC for RISC OS, the RISC OS port of GCC, and GCC Software Development Kit, the environment for developing GCC and porting programs to RISC OS. The latter is actually used to create the former. The documentation is split accordingly.

GCC for RISC OS

GCC for RISC OS is a complete, free and fully-featured compiler solution for RISC OS based on the GNU Compiler Collection. It can compile C, C++, and Fortran using modern standards. It also includes support for RISC OS modules, and usage of the native RISC OS Shared C Library, or the bundled Unix-compatibility library, UnixLib. Bundled with it are several development tools such as GNU Make, and an assembler. It aims to be feature complete above and beyond the commercial Castle's C/C++ compiler suite.

There also exist front ends for other languages, such as Objective C, Ada 9X, Modula-3, Pascal, Cobol and Java, however these have not been ported to run on RISC OS at this time. Some of these are present, but unsupported, in older versions of RISC OS GCC.

The current version of GCC for RISC OS is 3.4.6 (RISC OS release 3), and targets the traditional RISC OS AOF and AIF targets. A port of version GCC 4.1 is under development, and will target ELF, use binutils and support shared libraries - a feature long missing from RISC OS.

• GCC for RISC OS

GCC Software Development Kit

GCCSDK

GCC Software Development Kit (GCCSDK) is a portable build environment for creating RISC OS executables to be run natively on RISC OS. The build environment is designed to be hosted on a Unix-like system, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS X or even Windows (under Cygwin). GCCSDK releases are tied-in with the corresponding GCC releases.

GCCSDK can be used to compile and develop GCC and UnixLib itself, or as the basis for a cross-compiling system. It includes a number of "porting scripts" which automate the process of building and configuring new ports, which would otherwise be difficult and error prone, and not possible when done natively under RISC OS.

GCCSDK Autobuilder

The autobuilder is a powerful system for automatically fetching, configuring and building of sources and dependencies for programs, making use of the porting scripts. Done manually, such a process would be tedious, time-consuming and error prone. Once a program is added to the autobuilder, other developers can easily reproduce the work, and concentrate on the important details.

The autobuilder presently includes instructions for building around 150 libraries and programs for RISC OS.

• Using GCCSDK
• Putting a new program in the autobuilder

Development

The current development is focused on getting the GCC 4.1 compiler ported. Its main feature will be ELF static and shared library support. The status of this development can be found at GCCSDK Development.

GCCSDK GCC Releases

All recent GCCSDK GCC Releases can be found on the downloads page. Details on what is changed in each release can be found at GCCSDK Releases.

Upgrading from older releases

When upgrading it's recommended you move your existing !gcc application to somewhere it won't be seen by the Filer, and then download new GCC archives from scratch. Don't forget to download system.zip and merge it. If you have an old 2.x.x version you may need to remove or hide away !UnixLib and anything to do with Virtual and drlink too - UnixLib and drlink are now integrated in GCC, Virtual is no longer supported. If you have placed any extra programs such as 'make', 'as', or 'drlink' in your library directory you must remove or rename them.

Mailing list

A mailing list exists for GCCSDK discussions.

Bug reporting

To keep track of bugs in GCCSDK we are using a bug-tracking system. It is preferable to use this rather than e-mailing in order to avoid mails getting lost in our rather large inboxes and also in order to have an overview of any outstanding issues.

GCCSDK Source Repository

Until beginning of March 2006 all our GCCSDK source code was managed using CVS. At that point we converted our CVS repository into a Subversion repository and are no longer using CVS. Details how to access GCCSDK source repository can be found at our source repositories overview.

GCC and GCCSDK pages

GCC under RISC OS GCC for RISC OS, GCC tutorial, GCC common switches, GCC for beginners, UnixLib, ELFLoader GCCSDK and Unix porting GCCSDK, GCCSDK Releases, GCCSDK Development, Using GCCSDK, Autobuilder Development and Packaging Cygwin setup, Accelerating autobuilder with apt-proxy, ChoX11, Developer help wanted