PoC: build Helium on top of helloSystem image

[mszoek]

Create a Live CD ISO of helloSystem containing all the Helium changes from stock FreeBSD.

Success criteria:

• boots & installs
• working GUI
• Bar.app compiles and runs from Filer
• working clang/LLVM that understands frameworks
• fonts in /System/Library/Fonts (maybe symlinked for now)

[probonopd]

working clang/LLVM that understands frameworks

What is needed for that? Can you provide FreeBSD packages for clang/LLVM that understands frameworks?

[mszoek]

working clang/LLVM that understands frameworks

What is needed for that? Can you provide FreeBSD packages for clang/LLVM that understands frameworks?

Clang is part of the base OS. The Helium build applies patches to the release/12 branch before doing make world, so the resulting install ISO contains the proper toolchain. It also ensures that the correct ObjC ABI (version 3) is used by default, to match the system's libobjc.

yuki% clang -v
Helium clang version 10.0.1 (git@github.com:llvm/llvm-project.git llvmorg-10.0.1-0-gef32c611aa2)
Target: x86_64-helium-freebsd12.2
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /usr/bin

yuki% cat Foo.m
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
        __NSInitializeProcess(argc, argv);
        NSLog(@"Hello!");
}

yuki% clang -o Foo Foo.m -framework Foundation
yuki% ./Foo
2021-04-25 07:51:51.963 Foo[63214:800a82000] Hello!

I am thinking of putting my modified toolchain and the Headers from all the Framework bundles into their own bundle a la XCode and installing that in /Library/Developer as Apple does. I will still build it out of the FreeBSD source tree but relocate the executables.

Also toying with maybe bundling KDevelop or something like that into the Developer bundle to make it more like an XCode equivalent.

[tyu1996]

So does that means the Helium is now based on helloSystem?

[mszoek]

So does that means the Helium is now based on helloSystem?

Basically. I'm using the hello ISO generator (based on FuryBSD) and bundling the hello desktop components & apps on top of the Helium base system/kernel/toolchain. It gave us a big speed boost on getting a working desktop environment and some key pieces like the global menu bar, as well as fixing a bunch of issues with Xorg/drivers/etc, which lets me get back to working on Cocoa and Mac compatibility instead of fighting with build & release engineering challenges. The two projects' goals are close enough that collaboration makes sense, although I suspect Helium and hello will not be identical products.