Daniel,

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Daniel Joyce wrote:
> 6 months to port to MacOSx? Yeouch. So much for leveraging Unix... >.<

To be fair to OS X I think I should point out that absolutely everything
in the Unix VM other than the window and sound code compiled out of the
box with no modifications whatsoever.

The 5 months is due entirely to my limitations and comes from having to
learn from scratch how to write a MacOS X GUI application, then how to
write the same application while avoiding anything to do with
InterfaceBuilder, after which the window/keyboard/mouse/drag code was more
or less working in under a week.  Much of the unreasonable amount of extra
time came from my deciding that I wanted sound i/o to work too (another
learning curve) followed by OpenGL (which accounts for more than a month
of various hassles all by itself).  Then a week or so was put into
refactoring everything so that X11 and Quartz could live happily side by
side in both the source and binaries.  Maybe another week or so was lost
to figuring out and fixing a bug in autoconf and rewriting the FFI support
to be independent of libffi.  Most of the time therefore represents my
scrambling up several learning curves of varying steepness, with
development accounting for far less than 50% of the total.

Regards,

Ian