[erlang-questions] Fear and Loathing in Programming La La Land

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 12/04/2012, at 2:58 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
> I'm aware of a couple of other partial implementations which were never
> shipped.  At various times I've had copies of GERL and ETOS but would
> have a hard time finding them now; the Real Thing is so hard to keep up
> with...


I found my copy of GERL.
I cannot build it.
Solaris 'make' doesn't like the Makefiles.
GNU 'gmake' doesn't like them either.
Patch the makefiles by hand, and they don't work
because the package includes prebuilt code for
the wrong architecture, and Make has never
counted 'executable is for wrong architecture'
as a species of 'needs rebuilding'.  Fix that,
and it _still_ doesn't work, with a linker error.
It doesn't help that the how-to-build-it
instructions in the top level directory conflict
with the instructions in src.
For code released in 1998, the C code is
surprisingly not-quite-up-to-C-89.  As for the
C++ code, well, C++ has changed a lot since then.

A less than rewarding 90 minutes.

But the code *is* available.