Hey everyone,
Thanks for letting us join.
We’ve been working really hard to develop #Solidface, which is professional 2D/3D parametric CAD modeler software that offers free coaching & training. We’d love to hear some of your pains and thoughts about 3D modeling software so that we can continue to add innovative modeling techniques to our software.
If it doesn’t support Linux, I not only won’t use it, but I’ll suggest people stay away from it.
That’s kind of a strong approach to software @ThantiK , Do you feel there’s a technological issue at hand, or is it a matter of principle?
There’s no technological issue at hand. Any of the major software companies could do it with little development time, yet they choose not to. I don’t use Windows or OSX, and won’t on my personal machines. The companies behind each OS have a history of patent abuse and shady business practices. Not to mention, if you support OSX (being a posix standard) then the jump to Linux is practically nothing.
@ThantiK
I agree with Anthony. Microsoft has done alot of shady stuff. I don’t know about Apple. It is sure to be a small jump from OSX to Linux too. Just be sure to watch out for your byte order for the OSX to Linux swap.
I boot into Windows about 6 times a year though. Else than that, I use only Linux on my computers. One reason for this is that I find Windows to be unstable and it reboots itself or nags me about updating at totally the wrong time.
OS X on x86 is little endian, you must be thinking of PPC arch (which hasn’t been on a shipping Apple in a while), otherwise agree.
Most processors, even a lot of ARM processors have mixed-endian support nowadays. ARMv6 (RaspberryPi) supports it: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0301h/Cdfbbchb.html
@ThantiK be careful with statements like this, while a specific uP/CPU may be able to operate in both endian modes in various ways, this is irrelevant to porting software from one platform to another. The important questions is really how the compiler or interpreter for your language on the new platform works when handling integer variables wider than 8-bits. On this matter for converting from OS X (GNU4.x or LLVM) to Linux GNU4.x where both are running on an Intel x86_64 processor all integer variable handling should be consistent. Consistent integer math would not be a problem if developers were a bit more careful to use macros like OSSwapHostToLittleInt32() whenever multi-byte data is being handled across a suspect boundary, not nearly common enough.
The statement really doesn’t apply much to “normal” software developers in the first place. As you said, it’s mostly something dealt with by those working on compilers and interpreters.
Harumph! You kids these days and your fancy type safe scripting languages, K&R and unix fundamentals seem to be spooky black magic…
Well, if we’re talking safe scripting language, then we’re getting out of the realm of super-simple portability across platforms. OS X is posix compliant, but I doubt most of the software that is being written for OS X is.
Objective C is consistent with POSIX, except for that bolted-on object methodology and runtime type handling part. Once you stop getting cross-eyed from all of the brackets it actually is easier to handle than some of the more abusive constructs from C++ like overloaded operators and such.