Useful NeXTSTEP Research Notes

vmlemon (Today at 7:33 PM)

I never thought I'd see that materialised

Would be cooler, if I could actually breathe life into this stuff, and see it work, though

Feels kinda weird, seeing a GCC-based compiler, for Windows, engineered by NeXT, too

And, for whatever reason, they've nerfed the ability to get help for it, too

Interesting tuple, there

Feels really weird, seeing Windows-style paths, in a UNIX shell, and the tooling is pretty austere

CygWin's version of GDB? That's unexpected

That version of "df" seems kinda fucky, and cursed, too

Dunno why it reports negative values

Seems to ship its own, private copies of PostScript fonts, too

suzuran (Today at 7:47 PM)

Because you rolled over 2^31?

vmlemon (Today at 7:49 PM)

Probably - it's a 3GB filesystem, though, so well under the limit, for this version of NT

suzuran (Today at 7:50 PM)

Yeah, 2GB is the 2^31 line.

but knowing gnu stuff, they just used "int" and not "unsigned int"

vmlemon (Today at 7:50 PM)

That makes sense

The whole thing feels kinda kitbashed together, from disparate parts, and not everything seems to have source available for it

Managed to pull the "NeXT" directory out, from the Windows disk image, though, so I can have a better look at it

Seems to have more GNU stuff in it, than BSD stuff, somehow

And, the WindowServer seems to paint PostScript output onto GDI canvases/contexts

The Mach emulation stuff superficially seems less complex, than I expected, too - mostly just threading, and NT MailSlot communication

They don't seem to use that much actual Mach code, in the headers - there's only NeXT copyright headers, on that stuff, but they mention snippets being taken from CMU Mach