On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 04:02:42PM -0800, Conrad Meyer wrote: > This is very interesting! I think more work in this direction is a > good idea.
Thanks for your support. > Theoretically though isn't OS X just some other unix? It's better to think about it in terms of APIs: Linux: glibc (POSIX), glib, cairo, gtk, Qt, ... Windows: Win32, GDI, DirectX, ... Mac OS X: BSD libc (POSIX), Quartz, Cocoa, ... Programs that confine themselves to just POSIX calls (ie. opening and reading files, and other simple command-line operations) can compile on both Linux and Mac OS X no problem. However we want to be much more adventurous and port graphical applications. We have done this for Windows by bringing lots of those Linux APIs shown above over to Windows.[1] The situation on Windows looks more like this now: Windows: Win32, GDI, DirectX, glib, cairo, gtk, Qt, ... There is still no libc[2], but as long as a program uses Linux APIs such as glib, gtk, Qt etc it can now run on Windows. The situation for Mac OS X is essentially going to be the same. We need to provide the Linux APIs on Mac OS X, specifically glib, gtk, Qt and the rest. Mac OS X: BSD libc (POSIX), Quartz, Cocoa, glib, cairo, gtk, Qt, ... Luckily again there is work on porting these APIs that we can reuse[3][4] so it is "just" a simple matter of packaging this up. Rich. [1] I say "We" did this, but in fact the porting work was already done by many others - we "just" packaged it up and made it usable. [2] Because there is no libc, we end up rewriting some direct libc calls, as described here: http://camltastic.blogspot.com/2008/10/mingw-compile-software-for-windows.html [3] http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx/ [4] http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/opensource/appdev/mac-os-cpp -- Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v _______________________________________________ fedora-mingw mailing list [email protected] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-mingw
