Port to Mac?

[sadwillow]

Hey Aaron, great program. My mouth waters when I read about the feature set. Unfortunately, I'm here in the macintosh ghetto, and can't use your program on my computer. I'd happily pay for the indie license if you were to port it.

Now, I know you are busy. What with making a kick ass program better every day and all... But would it be possible to put the porting job in the hands of a small group of trusted programmers(presumably with NDAs)?

I love this program, but I can't play with it all day on the PCs at work. My boss suspects treachery...

Thank you for your consideration anyway,

Colin

[Aaron]

Hi Sadwillow,

Before I get onto discussing Mac ports, I should point out that you can run L3DT on unices such as Linux and OS X using WINE / Darwine. It's not as fast as a native binary, but it's still usable - at least it was last time I checked.

Regarding the port: I am working towards making the code portable, but I think it's too soon to make the jump now. What I've been doing with the last two releases and will continue to do with the next ones is to separate the 200,000-odd lines of code into separate modules, and abstract the UI or OS-dependent code into specific modules. In theory, this will allow the majority of the code to be easily recompiled for different OSes, with all the hard porting work confined to just a few modules. Once this refactoring is complete (or nearly complete), I'll have another look at porting to Linux and/or Mac OS X, including a consideration of cost/benefit.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[sadwillow]

Beautiful, mate. Really looking forward. I'll also be looking at WINE.

[sadwillow]

Hi, just a question out of curiosity. Can't find it right now, but I thought I remember a post where you(? I think) had l3dt running on a mac laptop. Using WINE.

My question is: was it an intel mac?

Darwine claims not to run exes on powerPC-based machines. Makes since. Kind of sad for me(boohoo and all that), but understandable. Would it be possible to get l3dt as a .so?

[Aaron]

Hi Sadwillow,

I'm not sure I've heard of people running L3DT on macs, but a few people run it in Linux with WINE on x86 machines. In my post, I was using Ubuntu Linux on an AMD (x86) desktop.

It's a bit of a bummer that Darwine doesn't support Win32 exes on the PPC architecture, but I read from their FAQ that they are working on adding an x86 emulator to make this happen.

I am working towards packing most of the functionality into DLLs, so it's conceivable they could be recompiled as SOs. However, I can't promise that will happen or give a timeframe in which it could happen - it's simply too far away at this point.

Best regards,
Aaron.