Comment by 🚀 stack
I suppose I am going way off topic... I am just curious what would make it worth it.
Feb 18 · 3 months ago
5 Later Comments ↓
@stack, and all, indeed from time to time we hear an opinion that this or that software is only available on windows or macos and that person has to use those systems.
what is intereresting is that we don't often hear the opposite: this sw is only on linux, i need to use it.
so if you search how to do something in gimp or blender - software that originates in unix, there are many manuals and tutorials about these programs with screenshots made on windows.
the reason is, lets saay we have gimp. not only its source is free, but all the libraries it depends on are also free. then all goes down to libc which in floss. via libc to kernel.
kernel has about 500 syscalls. not that many. most used are about 100 i guess.
by porting some amount of syscalls to windows or macos, then you can compile libc, then libxml2, etc, etc, gtk, gimp. it all works.
so porting from linux to windows on macos isn't hard.
porting from win or macos to lin is hard. even if the source of the program is available, it depends on many many libraries. and we dont have the sources of the dependency tree to try to compile it all on linux.
thus the situation with - someone will say their program is not available on linux but programs from linux will be available on other systems.
two more things to add:
a) most likely some kind of program like that is available under linux. it's not that exact program, but something like that most likely is written as floss and is available on linux. those people want their exact plogram, not something like that.
b) it is very important in design, how easy one can decouple a piece and then use it with other piece.
lets say one can get a wheel from one car and use on other. one may get an lcd from one device and use on other. not always etc, but not that weird either.
in windows and macos programs are so dependent on each other that it is hard to decouple them and make them work as standalone programs.
let's say recently i took the oberon compiler sources from oberon os, these sources contain code that is specific to oberon ui: how to get a compiler input from the marked viewer (it i sort of window). how to get a program argument from selection.
so i commented out and replaced the os specific dependencies and made the compiler to work in linux console. without oberon os.
but people say it is hard to get some part of systemd and use it without other parts in other non-systemd systems.
so they probably had the incentive to make it not easy to get parts of systemd without other parts of it.
👻 darkghost · Feb 19 at 12:53:
My work computer is Windows. We have scientific instruments and the vendor software is both eye wateringly expensive and Windows only.
Original Post
Cypher Editor — This couple of days I was playing with prototyping a text editor / notepad After the recent windows notepad RCE, I thought it might be fun By default, it supports aes cryptography, so it was designed for typing passwords, api keys or just usual stuff. It can open plaintext files fine, as well Has been fun coding all the editor's behavior. The cursor still has some weird bugs. It is about 1,5 MB on MacOS. Should compile fine to Windows and Linux as well.
💬 13 comments · 1 like · Feb 18 · 3 months ago · #coding #odin #programming #software #tech