@MartinW
Quote:
Apologies if my tone comes off as negative, but it's how I'm feeling about the platform in general at the moment and consequently it's not getting anything like as much of my attention as I would have liked.
That's ok :) You are not the first one and sadly not the last one who by some reasons at first think that obscure AmigaOS4 it is something which worth _that_ much. And that it have all the tools and languages available, and have a lot of developers and users. That of course was never and never will the case. Remaining of us trying to fix it in one or another way, but there are just not so many of us (and never will).
Any obscure OS will have lack of tools, many strange things, lots of unfinished and unreleased stuff (and even released, but then removed), and lots of pure strange and unlogical things. Some of us tried as hard as possible to explain that for every newcomer about, that they not need to hold a lot of hope for, a lot of praise for, and there are no needs to make os4 looks as it didn't look like: in real is just obscure OS for the fanatics, hackers, low-level coders and all sort of ppls who in interest in “strange” things. But it will never be "usual OS where all available".
The usage of the cross-compiler is simply better at current time because of above reasons : we have few developers, they all busy with everything else, so instead of spend their time on making native version of sgit , or awk, or whatever, they will be better use bug free, 100% times tested by 1000..xx users and developers around the world from compiler version to produce _native_ version of their tools. Not native building ? Yes, of course not native! Is it bad ? In current realm we should be happy that we even have cross-compilers , so we have a way to make work to be done with less issues, or to be done at all : for example, if not cross-compiler, there will be no Odyssye before, because even compilation of Odyssey few years ago for me on normal modern notebook take a hour. When we compile "only" gui parts on X1000 natively (8% of whole code), it take as much as it takes to build whole webkit (remain 92% of code). So you can imagine no one want to spend 2 days on building a thing, which can be build for a hour (and even faster today), only for "we can build it native" reasons :)
Of course, that not mean we not need native development tools. Of course, we require them too and better to have them too. But if we should choose, then we have what we have and what developers find better, at least for now, in the current state of things.
You shouldn't think that is issue with OS4 only : same happens with any obscure OS (And not only PPC and Amiga based ones). Even for ZX Spectrum all the games, all the art, all the coding done on PC tools and cross-compiler tools, and then adapted/polished natively. That just the reality of obscure and unpopular OSes and hardware.
In other words, don't put OS4 where is not. In reality, it is an obscure OS with the developers-hackers and users who understand it issues, some of which, sadly, will never be fixed. And some will be even worse. If you can enjoy it as it, and accept — then there will be a fun for you. If you will “hope” for more and more and be it like you wanted it to be, or like you see it at first, then it will be just rage-quit, burn out, and all that stuff.
Another practice can be applied to all this amigaos stuff: once you feel you are start to be annoyed, disappointed by anything , just take a rest for a month, or two, or a year, and then back when you will have motivation : at least that how some of us did :)
@billyfish
Btw, MightyMax taken over GDB porting, and few days ago were dealt with breakpoint/tracing stuff (he develops on qemu with peg2 emulation). So at least after few years there are progress in :)