Porting X11 Apps to Mac OS X Aqua?

masonbrown writes "I'm fairly new to programming, and have spent most of my time with Linux, Solaris, and IRIX, with most of my learning done on open-source software. As a long time Mac user playing around with Mac OS X, I'm interested in the portability of X11 apps to the new Mac Aqua interface. Is there any straight forward way of doing this, or does the GUI for each program have to be completely rewritten for the new Mac OS?"

Re:GNUstep!

[Patrix]

Not to mention that there is (was?) an effort to
also port GNUstep to WinNT... Thereby compensating
for Apple's murder of Yellow Box ;)

So you've got the same source code that compiles on UNIX, Linux, *BSD, NT, MacOS X, OPENSTEP, with very little modifications to the source and the Makefiles (which are by far the easiest makefiles I've ever seen, since GNUstep takes care of everything...

A developer's dream, that is finally coming true!

Patrix.

objective c

[Spiral Man]

I know that the OS X api is written in Objective C (cause they stole it from NeXTStep), not C++, so you may have a few problems there, since classes are defined and implemented differently in Objective C

Only 8 comments?

[mr100percent]

God how this article died. Musta been a slow day of readers

What about Gimp?

[dark3lf]

How difficult would The Gimp be to port to Mac OS X without using X11 and VNC or XTools?

Re:objective c

[rsteed]

Stole it from NeXTStep? Bone up on your history bud.

Carmack

[JL!]

I know John Carmack is porting X11 to OS X. Or was it just to Darwin? How will this affect the portability of apps?

Well, that depends...

[jfrisby]

X apps are pretty diverse. If you want to port a low-level X app that uses something like Xt/Motif or otherwise talks pretty closely to the X server, you're probably hosed.

On the other hand, if you are talking about porting a KDE app that uses the Qt/KDE APIs to the exclusion of lower-level junk, then it might be easier -- while there probably wont be a MacOS X version of Qt for a while, you'll be dealing with more abstract (semantically cleaner/simpler) APIs that map better to what's available on MacOS X.

Remember that you'll probably want to produce an app that fits in nicely and feels like a native application -- that involves a lot of work no matter where you're coming from. Doing a straight port of low-level X stuff to MacOS X graphics primitives (*shudder*) would give you an app with a pretty horrendous user experience...

-JF

GNUstep!

[eMBee]

most apps will pretty much have to be rewritten, unless you write them for GNUstep [gnustep.org] which is an implementation of the OpenStep specification, which itself is the base for Mac OS X.

GNUstep aims to allow you to write apps so that you will pretty much just have to recompile them for either GNUstep, OPENSTEP or Mac OS X.

greetings, eMBee.
--