11 Aug
2007
11 Aug
'07
1:27 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Another stupid question (forgive me, I am woefully
ignorant about
present-day "state of the Mac" issues:
If OS X is really Unix under the hood, then why do vendors of several
of my high-end applications that are offered in Windoze and OS X
versions all say "We have no plans for a Linux version"? It would
seem to be a pretty easy thing to do.
Well, it depends on which API they leveraged to write the application.
If it's Cocoa (which it probably is...), then it'll be different enough
from your usual UNIXy stuff that porting will be a
problem. Same with
Carbon, which is an API which allows one to write software that
works on
both OS 9 and OS X transparently.
Then there are POSIX and Java, for which the implications point to it
being very possible to port the software easily, but make it difficult
to use lots of OS X-specific features.
Peace... Sridhar