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I've long wondered how hard it is to port from Next to OS X

• SllX 6y ago
  I myself do not know, but your question jogged my memory on something cool. Behold: The OmniGroup Mac OS X mailing list archive. https://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/macosx-dev/ https://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/macosx-dev/ There aren’t many developers outside of Apple that jumped from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X, but the OmniGroup would represent a good chunk of them. More here: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo
• anthk 6y ago
  From OSX IDK, but from Next to GNUStep it may be straightforward with little change.
  • rbanffy 6y ago
    Porting from OSX to GNUStep would be far more useful.
    • pjmlp 6y ago
      Yeah, except they have stop around Panther or something like that.
      • anthk 6y ago
        No, GNUStep's support is more recent than that least the upstream version.
        • pjmlp 6y ago
          100% support? Because that is what I meant.
          • rbanffy 6y ago
            So, there are gaps to be filled or tools to flag them.
            • pjmlp 6y ago
              Which makes it useless for porting anything that people actually use nowadays.
              • rbanffy 6y ago
                That's the beauty of it being open source. If someone really needs it, they can do it.
                • pjmlp 6y ago
                  I thought that is more than proven than willingness and source code on their own just don't make it.
• yardie 6y ago
  If the developer used proper MVC it should be as simple as bolting on a GUI with interface builder. A lot of Next Step code has been in Cocoa for a long time (if you see NSObject, NSFoundation, etc. that's all NextStep).
• andrewf 6y ago
  This is someone starting with id Software's internal level editor for Doom (for NeXTSTEP circa '93), and getting it to build and run on OS X: https://github.com/fragglet/DoomEd/compare/b5885d42226568b18449687853e65cb46ddbea21...master https://github.com/fragglet/DoomEd/compare/b5885d42226568b18... There are a few takes on this out there, same for QuakeEd.
• protomyth 6y ago
  It wasn't that hard as I remember. I didn't hit anything but the Objective-C libraries though.
• tedge 6y ago
  ReDoomEd is a Mac/Linux/BSD port of DoomEd, id Software's Doom level editor for NeXTSTEP: http://twilightedge.com/mac/redoomed http://twilightedge.com/mac/redoomed About 95-99% of the program logic remained the same, however, there's naming differences (functions, classes, selectors), type changes (NeXTSTEP APIs used C strings & floats, Cocoa uses NSStrings & CGFloats), and missing functionality that had to be reimplemented (Display PostScript functions, Storage class). I originally expected to have to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI resources by hand in Cocoa, as Xcode's Interface Builder can't read NeXTSTEP nib files. However, Xcode's IB does read OpenStep nib files (as of Xcode 2.5 & earlier - not sure if recent versions can still do this), and OpenStep's Interface Builder can read NeXTSTEP nibs, so it just took opening & saving the NeXTSTEP nibs to OpenStep nibs in an OpenStep VM.
  • Aloha 6y ago
    Thats really cool! Its interesting to know how possible (and easy) it is. Thanks for your work, and pointing this out.