A demo app to try building a networked Rust application for PPC classic Mac OS. This application fetches some JSON from my server, parses it with serde and shows an alert with the temperature (the file on the server doesn't change).

Note: these steps have only been tested on Linux (Arch).

1. My fork of the Retro68 with updated binutils (binutils branch) built and on $PATH. E.g. export PATH=$PATH:/home/you/path/to/Retro68-build/toolchain/bin
2. rustup
3. Docker (if not on Debian based system) or binutils-powerpc-linux-gnu on Debian based systems For non-Debian systems build the binutils docker image: (cd powerpc-binutils && docker build -t binutils-objcopy .)

mkdir build cd build cmake .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=path/to/Retro68-build/toolchain/powerpc-apple-macos/cmake/retroppc.toolchain.cmake cd .. 

Compile the Rust code with:

cargo build --release -Z build-std=core,alloc --target powerpc-apple-macos.json 

Convert the static library to XCOFF, either via Docker or powerpc-linux-gnu-objcopy directly:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/src binutils-objcopy -O aixcoff-rs6000 /src/target/powerpc-apple-macos/release/libclassic_weather.a /src/target/powerpc-apple-macos/release/libclassic_weather.obj 

Build the C code, link in the Rust code, and produce the final binary:

cmake --build build --target FerrisWeather_APPL 

FerrisWeather.bin is the MacBinary encoded application, you can copy this to a machine or emulator to run it. Retro68 provides the LaunchAAPL tool, which combined with its server counterpart makes this very easy. With the server running on a machine or emulator you can launch the binary directly from you host with:

LaunchAPPL -e tcp --tcp-address 127.0.0.1 build/FerrisWeather.bin 

The rust-toolchain.toml captures the nightly Rust version I used. More recent changes to the Rust compiler mean versions after nightly-2023-08-02 don't work. See this issue for more details.