tomc@oakhill.UUCP (Tom Cunningham) (09/04/87)
I am new to this newsgroup and I wonder if anyone can give me some pointers.
We have some software written in C that currently runs on Berkeley Unix (Sun
and VAX), PC/MS-DOS, and VAX/VMS. We are considering a port to the
Macintosh II. One application is about 16,000 lines of code, 15 modules
(separately compilable files). The other is approximately 30,000 lines of
code, 25 modules. These applications are written to use the "standard I/O"
(stdio) library routines: fopen, fclose, fread, fwrite, printf, scanf, etc.
The larger application does some screen handling using BIOS on the PC,
curses under Unix, and SMG under VMS. Both make use of argc and argv.
We have a Mac II (or is that Mac ][?) with Lightspeed C, which provides
a very interesting development environment. From what I can gather, doing
a straight port to this machine is not possible. There is no support for
argc/argv, and a symbolic representation for a directory path for placing
input and output files doesn't appear to exist (perhaps the notion of path
doesn't exist?). I am sure there are other differences that I haven't
run into yet.
My question is this: is there something, a product or whatever, that would
allow one to do a (fairly) straightforward port? I guess I'm thinking of a
"shell" that you could wrap around the application to provide command line
input, paths, and what have you. It sounds like Manx might give you
something like that with Aztec C, but it also sounds like it's only for
the development environment; can you link it in to your user program?
Before you cynics out there say "buy A/UX" (Apple Unix, right?), I'm
just thinking that our customers might not want to buy a new operating
system just to use our software. They probably want to use their old
Macintosh software too.
Don't get me wrong about the Mac; I like the interface, and if we have to
delve into the Toolbox then so be it. But I am trying to explore
expeditious alternatives, and if we can do something to keep our software a
little more portable that would be great. Thanks for any light you can shed.
Tom Cunningham
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--
Tom Cunningham "Good, fast, cheap -- select two."
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