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by enzo1982 2451 days ago
As an open source developer, I have mixed feelings about this.

Yes, Microsoft seems very keen on keeping Windows compatible even with ancient versions of the OS. New stuff usually is optional and APIs that behaved strangely in Windows 95 still behave the same way in Windows 10.

In Apple land, APIs may change their behavior whenever Apple deems it necessary. I ran into issues because of this with almost every macOS update since 10.8. And I see that even big players like Adobe keep running into compatibility issues all the time.

On the other hand, I'm spending just a few hours per week working on my project [0] and I manage to support an app that now runs on 10.5 through 10.14 and on three different CPU architectures with a single package. So no, I don't think you need to "throw 100 programmers at it" to get a working macOS version.

[0] https://github.com/enzo1982/freac
3 comments
badsectoracula 2451 days ago
Not all applications are the same. Your application may not have the same requirements from the OS than some other application. As an (extreme) example, an application written in C that only needs from the host OS is a top level window and basic events for handling input while doing everything else with custom code will be much more portable and easy to keep up with changes than an application written in a language with its own runtime, creates a native UI for each platform, uses native APIs and tries to integrate with the native OS.
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saagarjha 2451 days ago
Although, it seems like you’re reimplementing platform controls? This seems like a mini-Qt: https://github.com/enzo1982/smooth
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enzo1982 2451 days ago
Yes, that's my own custom UI framework. Most of the platform dependent stuff is implemented in the smooth library.

In hindsight, it would have been easier to just use Qt, GTK or wxWidgets. But I learned a lot by doing this myself and wouldn't want to miss that experience.

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ben509 2451 days ago
I think it's more of a challenge when you have someone who is more skilled as a subject matter expert than as a programmer, which may be the case when you're the tech person or even founder of a small business.

That person may not be doing good unit testing, they might not use the best tools, and find that supporting different configurations may require a lot more manual work rather than maintaining some carefully crafted #ifdefs.

And maybe one person could do it, but one salary they can't justify based on the demand may as well be 100 programmers.

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