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Re: Executor Features
>>>>> "Thurman" == Thurman Gillespy <tg3@u.washington.edu> writes:
Thurman> I only use Macs, but I am distributing an image display
Thurman> program for medical images. People always want to know
Thurman> about a PC version, and I'm obviously interested in
Thurman> having my program run with Executor. Someone in our
Thurman> department got NIH-Image to run on a PC, which greatly
Thurman> peaked my interest. Unfortunately, I require some System
Thurman> 7 features, actually just the 4 required apple events,
Thurman> and the calls to CustomGetFile, CustomPutFile. So
Thurman> question 1, what are the plans for System 7 support? If
Thurman> you only supported the 4 required apple events, a lot
Thurman> more programs could run under executor.
We intend to "spoof" all of the "easy" System 7 features, including
apple events. Our preliminary plan is that the application will never
see any apple events. When it asks if any are present, the answer
will just always come back "no". That should make most apps happy.
We also plan to implement many of the System 7 filesystem extensions.
We intend to begin work on this as soon as 1.99m is out. Hopefully
we'll be able to spoof enough traps that many System 7 programs will
run. Tricky stuff, like QuickTime, is out of the question for now,
but most programs don't appear to demand the tricky stuff.
Thurman> Question 2. How feasible would it be to specify a (bogus)
Thurman> system call that actually pointed to some 386/486 code
Thurman> that would run in native mode? This code would make no
Thurman> calls to the Mac API, but could do a processing intensive
Thurman> task that normally takes a real hit when run in
Thurman> emulation. With the release of the Metrowerks CodeWarrior
Thurman> Platinum system next month, this kind of mixed
Thurman> development will actually become very easy on the Mac.
That wouldn't be hard at all; in fact, Executor already uses a
mechanism like this internally. We just don't (yet) have any
incentive to provide a public API for it. You have to beware of the
fact that x86 code manipulates little endian data, while a 68k
program's data is stored in big endian byte order.
-Mat
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