On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 11:32 +0800, Martin Hill wrote: > > From: Warren Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > If the Mac will be able to run win software well, will this be a > > double-edged sword? > > - will that encourage companies to only write software for Win, knowing > > it will probably work on the new macs good enough? > > That is a possibility. However, I reckon it is more likely that the fact > that porting to the Mac will then be so much easier and cheaper
I don't think it *will* be that much easier and cheaper. The difficulty has always been adapting your application to use MacOS/X's APIs, not the CPU - endianness and instruction set. Having SSE instead of AlitVec won't hurt, but for most developers the compiler takes care of that if they use it at all. Getting rid of the endian difference will be nice, too, but again probably not too major in comparison to the work required to do a proper port to MacOS/X. Porting from Windows to Linux probably involves a similar porting effort to what will be required to go to x86 MacOS/X. That said, there *are* tools to make that easier. There's a company called MainSoft that ports bits of Windows to UNIX to help Windows developers port their apps, for example. WINElib is another one - it lets your application "carry around" the Windows APIs it needs, giving app developers a sort of half-way-between porting target. All these work just as well on PPC though, and they haven't led to great floods of quick-'n-dirty ports. I wouldn't hold my breath. I doubt such ports would be received with much enthusiasm, anyway. Scribus started life on Linux, and even from there the port to MacOS/X isn't especially fun. Endian problems weren't a particularly big deal, but switching over to the "Mac way" of doing fonts, window management, etc is a lot of work. That's *despite* the fact that the app is built on a library called Qt that hides most of the basic differences - it actually ran on MacOS/X the first time I compiled it, it just needs fixes and polish. Given how much work that has been so far, and the "easy start" Scribus has thanks to Qt and it's UNIX heritage, I can assure you that there is a *lot* of work involved in a good MacOS/X port. -- Craig Ringer
