Re: [MACTCL] Ponderings of an open source developer...

[James B. <jk...@mr...>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 01:24:49PM -0500, Larry W. Virden wrote:
> Okay, if I were to be so foolish as to break terribly the family budget and
> buy a mac that runs mac os x, putting me into the dog house for the next
> 10 or more years, am i even going to be able to do any software development
> on the thing?  Or am I still faced with the fact that, as far as I can tell,
> one has to sink a large amount of cash into buying a c compiler?

In addition to the previous comments, I can add testimont to the fact that
MacOS X really is just like Unix underneath.

We received our Mac on Tuesday lunchtime. I'd never really used a Mac at all,
except once or twice (and hated every minute). Since Tuesday though I've
already got one of our tools ported to the Mac. Indeed part of it, which used
GNU autoconf, worked with nothing more than "./configure; make". Just like
Unix :-)

A Tk widget we wrote forms part of a DNA sequencing chromatogram viewer
(http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pubseq/manual/trev_unix_1.html) which requires
rapid scrolling and scaling. For this we use some basic X11 functions, but
thanks to the xlib code in Tk and Jim's work on the native Mac port the new
widget works nearly 100% correctly.

If you have more demanding X uses when the XonX project can provide a full
Xfree86 (currently v4.2) for MacOS X for free. Also the Fink and Gnu-Darwin
projects (also free) can provide the rest of the GNU experience (although at
present I haven't needed any of this as the standard development environment
seems to contain all I need except for Fortran, but I think f2c will solve
that).

I'm not trying to convert you from Linux on a PC to Mac - with 2 days
experience I wouldn't want to - but I am really quite astonished as to how
easy my porting work is going!

James

-- 
James Bonfield (jk...@mr...)   Fax: (+44) 01223 213556
Medical Research Council - Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH, England.
Also see Staden Package WWW site at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pubseq/