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Question: how different is mac-coding, compared to linux and/or windows?
Asked by ccernn (80.203.117.x) on July 18 2010, 12:32am
Reply on July 18 2010, 11:33am (edited at July 18 2010, 1:22pm):
    A lot of it overlaps with linux -- OS X is very much BSD-derived, so you have a lot of common things that FreeBSD and Linux have, such as pthreads, standard file APIs, etc.

    Where it primarily differs is that the recommended way to build GUI stuff is now Cocoa, which is Objective C, so that takes some getting used to. Objective C isn't bad, but it is quite different in syntax from using Win32 or GTK+ for example. There is also a deprecated Carbon API, but one probably shouldn't bother with it at this point.

    One issue with OS X that I've found is that there are generally about 5 different ways to do the same thing, and often it's hard to figure out which one is best (or even to find most of them). Recent examples include CGBitmapContextCreateImage() -- the obvious way to do something, that is soooo unoptimal. Or if you try to draw text to a RGB buffer, there's lots of choice in how to go about it (and no clear winner).
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