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Re: Future Questions
mat@ardi.com (Mat Hostetter):
> Long ago Executor was a source-compatible library, but it would be
> difficult to resurrect it in that form. There are also some very
> difficult issues for developers involving byte ordering; have you
> noticed that all platforms supported by Apple (680x0, PowerPC, and
> those supported by MAE) are all "big endian"?
> -Mat
Well, I must be missing something, but the platforms supported by
Apple all do so through emulation (in addition to native code). If
one is emulating 68K code, preserving endianness is nice, but a
fairly easy things for developers to avoid. After all, my program
runs on both 68K and x86 [but not VAX]. Just don't write out longs and
read them back as shorts or bytes. Read data in the same way you
wrote it out. You have to have architecture independant file code
but that can be done easily as well. What would be difficult to
do is handle WMF/BMP files as PICT files - probably not worth the
hassle, just let developers write a bit of code for that. (Well,
it could be done - just warn developers about the holes) Accessing
bitmaps/video would have to be patched up too, but none of this
is as much work as porting to a different API (all this would be
done, plus a whole bunch more :)
I'll take your word that it wouldn't be easy ;>
jeff
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