Swift on Mac OS 9

https://belkadan.com/blog/2020/04/Swift-on-Mac-OS-9/

by bdash • 6 years ago

272 44 6 years ago

kingnight2• 6 years ago

I recently have been getting into making a lot of small swift apps for personal use AND now have MacOS 7 and 8 running on my iPad since they’ve added mouse pointer support. Excited to dig into this article!

Cyberdog• 6 years ago

Okay, I'll bite: How are you running Classic Mac OS on an iPad?

asveikau• 6 years ago

I don't know if this is the way, but ~20 years ago I was curious about running emulators for 68k Macs on PCs.. there was vMac which emulated black&white Mac Plus, and basilisk II which emulated a macII. They could both run system 7. That was true circa 1998. I imagine the hardware needs are not that high.

kingnight2• 6 years ago

These two projects:

https://github.com/zydeco/minivmac4ios

https://github.com/zydeco/macemu/tree/ios/BasiliskII/src/iOS

The first is more stable, and recently got the pointer support added, but doesn’t go up to MacOS 8 AFAIK. I copied a bit of the stuff from that to the MacEmu one to get the pointer working ok.

Thank you Zydeco!

mattkevan• 6 years ago

Amazing. Would love to have classic Mac on the iPad. What a cool project.

mattl• 6 years ago

System 7, Mac OS after 7.6

bound008• 6 years ago

Awesome project and a great read! (Is it weird for anyone else to see such a nostalgic meme?)

scarface742• 6 years ago

This is the coolest, awesome most useless thing I’ve read in awhile. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

zozbot2344• 6 years ago

Far from being useless, this sort of work could ultimately make it easier to preserve existing Classic Mac OS-based apps and code, and run them on modern systems. Just as having FreeDOS around and even in active development makes it easier to support the DosBox platform.

krallja2• 6 years ago

Uh, how does making Swift compile new code to Mac OS 9 help with preserving old code?

rvz• 6 years ago

You'd have to go through a lot of hoops like LLVM, compiler, etc CPU support just to get a Mac OS app written in Swift visible on the screen on OS9. Very interesting technical read on CPU support, compiler support, no matter the usefulness.

Impress me further if you can do that with BeOS.

zozbot2344• 6 years ago

It would be interesting to upstream the LLVM-related work. And I do wonder how much work would it take to support other PPC32-based platforms - not just Apple and BeOS but AmigaOne, GameCube/Wii, *NIX and WinNT 3.51/4.0 systems etc.

jfkebwjsbx• 6 years ago

AFAIK LLVM only picks up backends that are production-maintained.

floatboth• 6 years ago

FreeBSD recently switched PPC32 to Clang and LLD https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/684fed6e06cc3d3cff... :)

As for WinNT and other non-ELF platforms systems, that's retro hobbyist territory, not very likely to end up in upstream LLVM. But you could always convert object files into the right format externally! e.g. for years building TianoCore EDK2 on non-Windows has involved conversions from ELF to PE (now there's also a CLANGPDB setting that produces PEs directly from LLVM)

quells• 6 years ago

There was some early work to get Swift running in Haiku: https://github.com/return/swift/commit/afca67566b0ed82f80ded...

highspeedmobile• 6 years ago

Well it seems that the same guy has actually also upstreamed it https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/11583

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

Cool! Is there a copy of the Swift BitPaint code anywhere? I couldn't see it. Just trying to gauge how much this could support.

kccqzy• 6 years ago

https://belkadan.com/source/ppc-swift-project/tree/HEAD:/exa...

mkchoi212• 6 years ago

Now, let’s run Swift on the original Macintosh.

davidbalbert• 6 years ago

In response to:

Fun aside: I’ve always assumed this is why Core Foundation exists—to provide a common interface between Carbon and Cocoa. I don’t actually have a citation for this, though.

This (very enjoyable) blog post from 2006 confirms it: https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/bridge.html. I believe ridiculous_fish was working at Apple at the time.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

Of course, while toll-free bridging is still around, its implementation details are somewhat different these days.

holistio• 6 years ago

This is so wonderfully utterly useless. I love it.

jacobush2• 6 years ago

I wonder if this was inspired by the person who compiled .NET for Windows 3.11?

radley• 6 years ago

OS X was released 19 years (+ 1 week) ago...

jacobush2• 6 years ago

I suddenly felt the old Amiga fanboi inside of me pop up... :-)

At one time, up to at least 1996 the fastest Mac for running Photoshop, was not a Macintosh at all, but an Amiga tricked out with a graphics card and a CPU upgraded from the standard 68020 or 68040 to Motorolas last entry in the 68k line, the 68060. (Roughly equivalent to a Pentium - a bit slower clock but slightly more powerful instructions.)

How could this be? Photoshop 4 used 68k instructions, and the fastest 68k based Mac was the Quadra with the 68040 CPU. The first PowerMac was released in 1994, but it had to emulate the 68k to run Photoshop, which had a serious performance hit. Once Photoshop was released for the PowerPC, this anomaly ended.

(And Photoshop on Windows must have been faster than both Amiga and Mac pretty much immediately, but if I recall correctly it wasn't as capable on Windows right then. Or maybe people used to working on Macs for magazines etc just weren't prepared to switch platforms on a whim.)

So, Amiga was the original Hackintosh. :-)

But the copyright situation was even thornier then - to start the emulator you'd have to copy ROM images from a real Mac, and the only legal way to do that was to buy a Mac.

(Not that anybody did that, they just copied the ROM onto a floppy.) I think the preferred emulator was Shapeshiter. It worked remarkably well because most Macintosh programs did not use any direct hardware access but used the Apple provided official APIs.

Another anomaly was that Amiga was dead as a commercial gaming target by then, and so did not receive a port of Doom - but you could run the Macintosh version of Doom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spHpv3NKQhI

Earlier, there was even an older Mac emulator for the Amiga which tried to go the legal route by having a little hardware board you could put Mac ROMs into. (And then of course people copied the original ROMs and put them on EPROMs.)

Edit:

the same CPU upgrade almost happened to 68030 based Macs:

https://lowendmac.com/2016/cpus-motorola-68060/

greendave• 6 years ago

Remarkable. Today the fastest Mac is also a hackintosh, so some things have not changed so much.

That said, the first PowerPC Macs shipped in March of 1994 and Photoshop 3.0 for Mac in November. While the application was not native, a number of the filters were, so depending on what you did, they could be faster. Photoshop 4.0 was indeed fully native (November 1996).

laszlokorte• 6 years ago

I would be happy already if the swift>3.x would run on my osx sierra machine

jdub3• 6 years ago

This article encouraged me to finally buy the iMac G4 I've always dreamed about.

xattt• 6 years ago

This post is obviously written with sarcasm. However, I've been enamoured with the G4 Cube and 12" PowerBooks since they first came out and haven't been able to find a device that's been as aesthetically pleasing since.

This may have something to do with those being as objects of desire from my youth.

jdub3• 6 years ago

No, I was absolutely serious! Bought one on ebay tonight. :-)

lostgame• 6 years ago

Mine is one of my most treasured possessions and is in daily use.

jdub3• 6 years ago

What are you running on it? Latest macOS or Linux…?

jamesfmilne• 6 years ago

The big takeaway for me is the MPW emulator that lets you run the tools from MPW.

Gonna give that a go!

Swift on Mac OS 9

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