[jordigh]

Seeing how it's cross-compiled into Windows, I reckon the reason it's not made for macOS yet is that there is no way to cross-compile into that OS yet. We have similar difficulties in building Octave for macOS.

This is really frustrating. Because Windows is so foreign, free hackers worked hard to make it palatable and created mingw32, which allows wonderful things such as being able to build for Windows without having Windows. Because macOS is "Unix" and, look! it has a few scraps of "open source" in it, nobody ever felt the need to reimplement its API for free hackers and thus allow cross-compiling.

And no, homebrew is not the answer. People seem unaware that there's much more to Unix than a passing familiarity in the CLI. The different audio and graphics and lack of X, and many other differences in macOS make it a very foreign OS for free development. Porting Octave to macOS has been a tremendous effort of many years that has never really yielded completely satisfactory results.

[pjmlp]

People keep forgetting that the standard UNIX interfaces are only good for CLI, server and daemon applications.

Anything else isn't easier just because a system is UNIX.

The same porting issues would arise when porting to anything else that isn't GNU/Linux.

[jordigh]

Well, porting to Windows is actually easy thanks to mingw32 and MXE. At least easier than macOS. It's also far easier to get Octave on the BSDs. So frustrating that macOS is the most difficult target.

[pjmlp]

I had lots of fun porting software between Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, GNU/Linux and Windows NT/2000 back the late 90's up to until 2003.

That is where I learned what actually means "portable" UNIX software, specially if it needs resources like audio, external hardware or GUIs.

[qwertyuiop924]

Nowadays, SDL, the proliferation of X, and OpenAL make the situation better. But it's still a mess.