Hacker News Reader

A funny story: Ambrosia Software was, for many years, THE name in Mac gaming. Their biggest series was the Escape Velocity space sim titles. The final release in the series EV Nova, was popular enough to be released for Windows, as well. Years passed, Ambrosia went the way of the dodo, and now, if you try to run Nova on a modern Mac, it's basically impossible due to all the platform changes since the release... except by running the Windows version, via Wine.

The best reason I can come up with to mimic Cocoa, rather than Win32, is that macOS users are the most... discerning about native versus non-native apps. So a Windows-first app on macOS will certainly be noticed, but that's not as true for a macOS-first app on Windows.

> You mean all the other OS's reverse engineering Cocoa?

I mean the mainstream toolkits and their vendors all providing a Cocoa-shaped API that solves the problem described in the article and solved in a way that is relevant to the context.

> it doesn't feel native anywhere but macOS

"even if only in order to provide a lowest common denominator"

See also the alternative we're talking about: Electron—how native does it feel?

> macOS apps tend to use a lot of OS APIs (e.g. Metal) that are outside Cocoa

You're moving the goalposts.

> Objective-C isn't that productive of a language by modern standards

I never mentioned Objective-C.