Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Frontier tapping directly BSD on Mac OS X

Author:Nicholas Riley
Posted:9/18/2000; 3:48:55 PM
Topic:Frontier tapping directly BSD on Mac OS X
Msg #:21481 (In response to 21396)
Prev/Next:21480 / 21482

Am I dreaming of is it worth exploring?

It's very very easy to do. There is no problem at all mixing standard BSD calls in a Carbon app running under Mac OS X. In fact, several programs have been ported exactly that way - with UNIX back end and Carbon front end. The two most prominent examples I can think of are Apple's Java implementation (which uses a back end derived from Sun's Java for Solaris, and a Carbon user interface from Apple's MRJ, with Quartz for graphics thrown in), and Fizzilla, Mozilla's Unix networking, filesystem, etc. code with an interface in Carbon.

OTOH, part of Frontier's appeal (to me at least!) is its portability. Like Apple Events, if you started inserting random calls to the BSD layer, then you'd restrict your portability significantly. Most of them aren't available on Windows if you're not using a package like Cygwin.

I think there's an interface to the command interpreter in Frontier/Windows, which would be simple to adapt.

--Nicholas

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