Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

belkadan.com

122 pointsDetrus36 comments

I love these kind of anachronistic efforts, like the one in the article or the one getting Rust to run on Win98[1] from around the same time.

[1]: https://seri.tools/blog/compiling-rust-for-legacy-windows/

Slack on Windows 3.11 https://github.com/yeokm1/w31slack

C# on Windows 3.11 https://www.hanselman.com/blog/net-everywhere-apparently-als...

With Win 3.1, some IRC client and Bitlbee you can chat everywhere :).

Also, a gopher client makes the Win 3.1 desk not-so-obsolete.

Ok, let's back to languages. I think some versions of Lazarus/Free Pascal still target Win 3.11 or Windows 9x at least.

Mac OS 9 was really aging even at that point in time, was crashing all the time from what I heard, and so on, but. It looks amazing.

Monterey wishes it looked half as good as OS 9 looks like

OS9 was very stable, but some apps weren't e.g. photoshop would crash a lot, and as there was no protected memory space for processes every app crash balked the entire system. Happy days.

OS9 was as stable as W98SE. Not as bad as W98/W95, but still crashy.

Win98SE was the high water mark of a fast, stable, small MS Windows environment. Here it is in under 5 megs of hd space : https://web.archive.org/web/20080306134751/http://www.eteak....

Heh. Small, but not stable. I suffered it at home. Sound/chipset driver install = BSOD. "High" load on IE with several (less than 10) Windows open = BSOD.

If an app can crash your system, that means the system is not stable in my books

Oh it wasn't robust by todays standards (or any standards really), but it would be wrong to infer from that that the quality of OS9 was inferior to OS8, OS7, rotting, etc.

I say as a Mac user, while not inferior to other MacOS’s, it was however inferior to the stability of the counterpart versions of Windows, more-or-less since inception. The stability gap got wider and wider as the years went on and Windows 2k made OS9 look like a joke. OS X closed that gap and then quickly surpassed it.

I still think the distinction is (a bit) valid. You could run a stressed mail server on os9 for a year with no downtime/ no maintenance. The chances that the afterthought mac port of the windows software that you need to run would be flakey? - pretty high. These apps crashed just as much on osx, at least until macs become popular enough to not be able to get away with it. The process isolation made it more bearable, but you'd still lose your work. The benefit of osx wasn't spontaneous reliability (although, some things - font handling, printing - ok, it kinda was), it was that you could now run high quality open source alternatives (it's weird to remember just how difficult that was on OS9).

> stability gap got wider and wider as the years went on

no mention of virus here?

Contrary to the other commenters rose colored glasses, as someone who ran OS9 at the time, it was indeed very unstable.

The entire MacOS classic line of OS’s were horrible for stability. Any small bug in any program could knock out the entire OS, and they did multiple times a day. Don’t get me wrong, the love put into the OS was palpable. That’s why you used it. It just crashed all day every day.

I didn’t have this experience, but perhaps because I mainly played games at the time. Maybe the type of games I played just crashed the system less than -say- productivity software.

In my W98SE experience, by installing drivers and using some multimedia software (or libraries) would crash it often.

I want to counter the idea that OS 9 was either stable or not stable. I made money in grad school fixing people's Mac OS 9 setups, and I had many satisfied customers. Basically, one bad Apple spoils the barrel. If you add "crazy media network extension from hell" alongside all your dozens of working apps, then yes, the whole OS becomes unstable. Similarly with low-quality Photoshop plugins, OS startup services, odd hardware drivers or even corrupt font files.. yes, the whole OS can crash "daily".

On the other hand, like a great day at a public theater act, when it goes well, it really does go well. I have OS disks and applications saved to this day, in their own filing system in a drawer, that run great, look great, and are a joy to use. And so you know, months of daily, extensive use, with no crashes.

I didn't start using a mac until iPhone development started, so the earliest version was 10.5 for me, but in that and later versions, the entire system could be crashed by corrupted fonts, not even system fonts.

Go until 1.3 supported all the way back to Windows 2000. I was pretty sad when they yanked support, the idea of becoming a hermit running Win2k writing Go is an oddly satisfying fantasy.

go is one of the rare language i can imagine using on a 20+ yo hardware / software stack. The whole go tooling is so much focused on simple and performant design that i think it wouldn't be too bad of an experience.

Until very recently the default linker for D on 32 bit Windows dated back to the 80s.

You could nearly get D code working for a 16 bit computer due to the history of the dmd backend, even.

Apart from it being an absolutely terrible programming language

Go is a wonderful language, what are you talking about

Cloud native language of choice for a reason ;)

Discussion from when it was first written: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754667

I'm trying to restore mac OS 9.2 on my still working iBook G4. I am ordering old CDs to see if I can restart the system. It has an Mac OS X Tiger installation that is blocking.

The iBook G4 only officially supports Mac OS X and Classic (a Mac OS 9 virtual machine), don’t waste your time ordering old CDs that won’t work. If someone has managed to get Mac OS 9 running, they’ll probably post instructions or a download on a forum like Mac OS 9 Lives.

When I bought the iBook it came with Mac OS 9 installed.

CodeWarrior was such a cool name. I wish Apple kept it over Xcode :)

CodeWarrior was commercial software, Apple's pre-OS X developer tools were called "Macintosh Programmer's Workshop".

It was bought up by Motorola/Freescale around the turn of the century and lived on as tools for embedded processors until fairly recently, although the later releases were based on Eclipse.

I wrote MPW tools integration for MetroWerks on contract; I delivered it to the VP Engineering for MWerks in person.

CodeWarrior wasn't an Apple product; it was a third-party IDE made by a company called Metrowerks.

Awesome awesome awesome awesome, love reading about these retro hacking adventures. Huge props to the author!

This should have (2020) in the title.

And now it does :)

nice, wish I had seen it earlier. :D

I was genuinely confused by the April 1st comment until I saw the URL, guys please timestamp your articles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com