OpenStep, Rhapsody and NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP apps

[Ken Case]

> do you have and would you share with us any insight, as to which
> degree NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP applications will run under Rhapsody
> (once the unified version is out)?
>
> It would be really important, that at least the newer Apps, that
> run, say under NS 3.3 (or at least 4.x, x meaning 0 or 1), still
> run under 'Rhapsody'.

I doubt that anything will run under Rhapsody without a recompile.  The  
Unix layer in Rhapsody, based on BSD 4.4 rather than BSD 4.3, has  
different interfaces.  (There's some chance that they could provide  
compatibility interfaces into the kernel and compatibility shlibs, but I  
suspect that NEXTSTEP compatibility isn't a high priority for Apple.   
Much as supporting POSIX interfaces wasn't a high priority for NeXT.)

Applications will obviously have to be recompiled to run on Rhapsody/PPC.

Apple has said that the Yellow Box in Rhapsody will be OpenStep-based,  
so anything written exclusively to the OpenStep APIs should be an easy  
port (if not just a recompile).  If an application runs now under both  
OpenStep/Mach and OpenStep/NT, my feeling is that OpenStep/Rhapsody  
should be a fairly easy port (since it's a lot more similar to  
OpenStep/Mach than OpenStep/NT is).

Unfortunately, the OpenStep APIs don't cover everything:  for example,  
there's no OpenStep API for manipulating TCP/IP sockets, so to do that we  
have to drop down to native operating system calls (BSD for OS/Mach,  
Win32 for OS/NT).  At Omni, we write classes to insulate us from those  
native calls whenever OpenStep doesn't do it for us--for example, our  
OmniTCPSocket class insulates us from the native TCP/IP calls, and we  
only have to port it to get our TCP/IP sockets working under new variants  
of OpenStep.

				Ken