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Re: Porting from Windows to Mac

On Oct 31, 2008, at 1:21 AM, Jean-Daniel Dupas wrote:
Le 30 oct. 08 à 23:49, Stefan Werner a écrit :
I would also recommend that you start over with the design of your GUI, for
the sensibilities and design principles of Mac OS X are very different. This
difference is exacerbated if you consider the age of MFC... 
You are aware that MFC (1992) is younger than NextStep (1988)? ;-)
And if age is a criteria, we should always prefer Carbon over Posix.

Yes, but is older than the OpenStep specification (1993) that is the true ancestor of Cocoa.

NeXTSTEP is the true ancestor of Cocoa. The NeXTSTEP APIs were quite similar to OpenStep (of which, of course, Cocoa evolved out of).

There is relevance to Cocoa-dev here, assuming that an understanding of history helps you.

The shift from NeXTSTEP to OpenStep was really focused on a several of areas of change.

- The memory management model moved from a classic straight alloc / free model -- literally, objects implemented -free and you called that directly to tear down and deallocate the object -- to a reference counted model using -retain/-release/-autorelease.

- Much of what had been straight C APIs were replaced with classes and methods on said classes. User Defaults functions moved to NSUserDefaults, for example. File management, archiving, and a number of other fundamental subsystems were moved to Objective-C.

- NSString was added, along with NSDate and NSNumber, and the NEXTSTEP collection classes (List and HashTable) were retired in favor of NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSSet. List and HashTable supported non- ObjC types, but this greatly limited their capabilities. The new collection classes -- what you have today -- were pure object contains and, thus, operations like archiving, KVC, etc... were enabled.

- In general, much of what had been code that every developer seemingly needed to write over and over were captured as general purpose, reusable, APIs.

When OpenStep was released, it contained a porting toolkit that would run through an application's source and convert it to use the new APIs.

Trivia: Andrew Stone's Create -- www.stone.com -- is the only Cocoa application (that I'm aware of) that has run on every single release of Mac OS X, OpenStep, NeXTSTEP, or derivatives (including Sun's NEO) as well as on every processor for which support shipped -- m68k, i386/ mach, i386/windows, SPARC/mach, SPARC/solaris, PA-RISC, PPC, and maybe some I'm forgetting.

(Before joining Apple, one of my last contracts involved porting a 750,000 line Objective-C++ application from NS 3.3 to Mac OS X 10.2 [Jaguar]. It was actually quite a bit of fun and required effectively porting to OpenStep 4.2, then Rhapsody DR1, then Mac OS X Beta, then -- finally -- Mac OS X 10.2. By doing this, I was able to port the rather complex NIBs, including custom palette support, from NS 3.3 to MOSX 10.2, taking advantage of the compatibility archive support in AppKit/IB at each stop to preserve the NIBs. Thank goodness for Virtual PC!)

b.bum

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References: 
 >Porting from Windows to Mac (From: "Rakesh Singhal" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Porting from Windows to Mac (From: "Νικόλας Τουμπέλης" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Porting from Windows to Mac (From: Stefan Werner <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Porting from Windows to Mac (From: Jean-Daniel Dupas <email@hidden>)



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