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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

In the late '90s, NeXT/Apple actually had a Cocoa runtime for Windows. It was called Yellow Box (but only shipped as part of Enterprise WebObjects, IIRC). It was closed source, of course, and 3rd parties couldn't ship apps using it.

In this bizarro world we live in, Microsoft has rebuilt essentially the exact same thing and has released it as MIT-licensed open source.

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A version of this (called YellowSubmarine) ended up shipping in iTunes and Safari for Windows. You should be able to find a libobjc.dll, CoreFoundation.dll, etc. if you look around your filesystem.

TIL, interesting. I wonder if they are keeping it just in case one day they need to ship other apps in Windows (e.g. Xcode, Mail, Reminders, etc)

Yellow Box was something slightly different, NeXT had an actual shipping product called OPENSTEP Enterprise targeting Windows NT. It did allow third parties to build and ship apps using it. Apple discounted it and continued to sell it for a while. See

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/apple-cuts-prices-on...

Safari for Windows used to ship with a lot of the CoreFoundation / NS* libraries in very obvious places (i.e., CoreFoundation.dll).

I still have the WebObjects 4.5.2 (and 4.5.1 I think) boxes somewhere - the last version to support Objective-C on the desktop (that is Windows).

I was really overwhelmed with joy, when I saw how one can add say middle-wheel support to a whole system, without recompiling, or doing some low-level drivers, hacking, etc. - but by just extending it with OO - this is the code I'm talking about - http://www.rubicode.com/Software/Legacy.html#RCWinMouseWheel

It's probably not safe to do things like this nowadays (security), but I still like the whole idea of one being able to replace classes with others without recompiling everything from scratch.

I have not debugged iTunes on Windows, but I have a feeling that there is at least some AppKit wrapping going on (perhaps akin to UXKit) for Windows.

iTunes on Windows is as much AppKit as it is on OS X; which might be to say, not much, maybe… but definitely a lot of ObjC and Foundation.

I thought it used to be C/C++ and only based on Carbon. Has that changed?

Proably, Xcode 6 saw the death of the Carbon tools.

Wasn't a lot of it ported to Cocoa / AppKit a few years ago?

It would be even more bizarro, but perhaps also magical, if this eventually forms the basis for an alternative to GNUStep.

Is the main missing chain a lack of WinRT and XAML support in Mono?

Yes, and it came with Mail.app also (which is from NeXT, and the ancestor of Apple's current Mail app on Mac OS X, and maybe a few other desktop programs.

I remember using it as my email client for a while, on Windows NT.

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