Re: Mac Version of Amaya

> We obviously recognize the impact of Macintosh users and developers
> on the Web, and we are very eager to see a Macintosh version of
> Amaya.  Macintosh developers are encouraged to have a look at Amaya
> and to consider doing the port.  Amaya is open source and uptodate code
> is always available through the open CVS base.
> 
> Any volonteer?
> 
> Vincent.

Funny you should mention a Mac port. I spent last weekend doing a first
pass of porting the Amaya source to the Mac. Based on my initial
experiences I think there is little point continuing with this project
unless some serious questions are answered about how much tidying up of
the code base can be done. I found the source files littered with
conditional compile directives, more than two hundred. All these
directives need to be migrated to either header files, or conditional
#define's, before I would consider it to be a worthwhile project
finishing the mac port.

I say this as someone who has been a profession commercial shrinkwrap
developer for 16 years, 15 years Mac, 10 years Windows, and who has
ported apps between the Mac, Windows, and Unix for the last 7 years.
I've seen lots of multi-platform code bases and have found some very
effecive techniques for isolating platform specific code, and for making
multi-platform code much more maintainable.

Based on my initial inspection of the source code it seems like a fairly
reasonable quick and dirty port to Windows. The main problem with this
approach is that while two platforms can be supported and maintained
without too much grief, adding a third platform to the mix is usually
enough to make the code base very difficult to maintain for the third
platform, and usually has a negative impact on support for the first two
platforms as well.

If the Amaya code base was presented to me by a client I would advise
them to use the opportunity to do a serious design review of the code
base, to make sure that all platform dependent functionality had
migrated to a platform services layer, and that this layer was then
implimented in a platform neutral manner. 

From what I can see the Amaya code base is a lot closer to this ideal
than a lot of the commercial application code bases I've worked on over
the years. I dont know if this is the correct forum to discuss in more
detail what could be done to make the code base more portable, and what
would be involved in getting it working on the mac. But I would be more
than willing to discuss further what would be involved in a Mac port, as
I, for one, would love to have Amaya up and running on the Mac.

- Joseph McConnell

San Francisco, Ca

Received on Friday, 18 June 1999 14:59:59 UTC