[erlang-questions] Support for HiPE on OS X Intel

[Paul M]

Hello everybody,

There is some code in the erlang source distribution to support HiPE  
for OS X Intel, but it looks like it is currently broken. Also, it  
requires some (mac-specific) external files to build, and from  
browsing the mailing list archives, I see that the HiPE folks don't  
use macs and so don't have the facilities to test it or maintain it.

I've spent a little bit of time looking into the current mac-related  
problems, and I've come to the conclusion that the mechanism used to  
patch sigaction() (namely, mach_override) is a bit esoteric. I think  
it could be fixed and replaced with a more conventional mechanism (in  
short, building a shared library and setting an environment variable  
to cause that dylib to be loaded at launch time), but I'm not sure if  
this is the kind of change that the team would want to incorporate or  
even how to submit a patch, since I haven't seen a repository that can  
be checked out or anything. I'm also not aware of the recent bus  
errors introduced as of OS X 10.5.3 are the only issues with HiPE on  
the Mac.

I apologize if any of this  has been covered already - I spent some  
time searching the archives and didn't see anything applicable.

Thanks!

Paul