Re: The OS wars and DOOM...

[Andrew Loewenstern <andrew_loewenstern@il.us.swissbank.com>]

>  Apps have migrated from Unix to the Mac and the PC before in the
>  past. In the further past, this has included curses and
>  other-types-of-text-control packages such as PC versions of Emacs
>  and nethack and the like.

>  Of course, this was not done with graphical programs; everyone
>  knows that graphics isn't Unix's strong suit, and what it has is
>  so different from the PC, etc., blah, blah,...

>  Except that for the past two or three years, it's been WRONG.
>  One of the hottest games on the PC, DOOM, was originally written
>  in Nextstep (a Unix variant, and a ghetto even amidst the "ghetto"
>  of Unix) and then ported to the PC.

Being a resident of the NeXTSTEP ghetto, please allow me to chime in.  While  
Doom is written on NeXTSTEP boxes, that's about all the game itself has in  
common with it.  The game is carefully written in strict ANSI-C and any  
portions that must be OS specific are separate.  They have a VGA emulator  
that allows them to run Doom on non-DOS boxes.  All of the platform  
independance comes from the discipline of the developers (who are extremely  
talented, IMHO).  In contrast, Lotus Improv was NeXT native and had to be  
completely rewritten over a period of at least 3 years to get it to work on  
Windoze.

The primary reason Id software (and Trilobyte among others) uses NeXTSTEP  
(over DOS or any other unix environment) is because it lets them write  
in-house tools like map and monster editors really fast (and really slick  
too!).  On any other platform it would take much more time and effort to  
write the tools and they probably wouldn't be as nice either.  Since these  
tools aren't being sold to customers, it doesn't matter that they only run on  
a dead-end niche software platform that costs $1000 per user (and $5k per  
developer!!).

This strategy makes sense for a commercial video game where there is the  
opportunity to save major amounts of time and effort through the use of  
custom tools (and the incentive of major amounts of cash if it is  
successful).  However, this strategy definitely doesn't make sense when you  
are talking about a cypherpunk donating their spare time to write a freeware  
(or copyleft) crypto app.  Better would be to just write the app for the  
target platform or write it using an environment that is designed to be  
platform independant (like Java).


andrew
...able to work cypherpunks relevance into virtually any thread......and uses  
Python instead of NeXTSTEP when writing stuff that needs to be  
platform-independant...