From: Alexandre Naaman (naaman++at++sgi.com)
Date: 10/21/2005 15:11:25
Hi Hugh,
> Just notice that there are some #ifdef APPLE lines in the
> Performer 3.2 headers. Are we likely to get Performer for
> Mac OS real soon, at some time, possibly?
>
> Using X11 libraries instead of the native Cocoa/Core UI
> wouldn't bother me. A new multi core G5 PowerMacs with
> nVidia FX 4500 graphics and Performer ... drool.
At some point we did a "I wonder how difficult it would be to port to
OS X" test and what you're seeing is the result of that.
Every year during Friends of Performer (at SIGGRAPH and other trade
shows & conferences) we poll folks to find out how interested they'd
be in a Mac port. The most difficult problem we face when it comes to
adding a new platform is properly supporting that platform (after
all, unix is unix, and gcc sucks equally on all platforms :). And ya,
I know, you'd probably be happy with a completely unsupported version
and so would I if I were in your shoes, but that's not the way the
world works, unfortunately.
For whatever it's worth, the existing work was done using X11.
Writing some native code would be nice, but definitely didn't fall
into the let's-see-what-can-be-done-quickly category. That plus none
of us here have any knowledge of Cocoa (yet) and writing the
windowing code is one of the more tedious parts of doing a port, that
plus of course everything related to locks, shared arenas, timing
stuff, etc ... Going beyond a "look mommy I have a window I can
render into" to "we can now run perfly" isn't trivial; getting things
to compile by inserting a lot of ifdefs on the other hand, not so
hard :)
A+,
Alex.
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