on 2012-08-30 7:39 P. J. Alling wrote
Any complex software is going to be very difficult to port from a PC to a MAC.
some is very hard, but some very complex software has for years been relatively smoothly maintained on Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc.
Changes in PC software architecture make it difficult enough to move from one platform to the next if Microsoft didn't maintain support for older methods. Apple drops support and things stop working. often requiring a total re-write, sometimes a re-design of core functionality. This is not trivial, and you know for 10% of the market it's just not often worth it.
i assume you're talking about Apple's Carbon API, which was designed to help Mac OS 9 apps run on OS X; Carbon has finally just been deprecated after 12 years, but it was no surprise; extricating software from legacy dependencies is indeed a stormy passage (i'm rewriting several thousand lines of Frontier code in Python at the moment), but most big cross-platform apps have navigated beyond Carbon successfully
i do think it's amazing how far back Microsoft's support goes, but Microsoft hasn't (yet) faced the kind of desperate situation that Apple solved with Carbon; developers nowadays see multiple platforms as a fact of life, and deal with a must faster pace of change in iOS, Android, and web APIs; some examples of apps developed concurrently for four platforms are Dropbox, Evernote, Chrome, 1Password, Google Earth ...
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