Added October 2016
So why is there not a version of A-Shell for the Mac? Since A-Shell is written in C, and there's a C compiler for the Mac, can't it run? Here's the reply from the horse's mouth, as it were.
Yes, there is a C compiler for the Mac, and yes, A-Shell could be made to run on the Macintosh. The obstacles are:
| • | The flavor of C has a number of quirks that would probably require some time to figure out. |
| • | The Mac environment, although based on Linux, has a number of peculiarities that would have to be worked through. |
| • | We don't know anything about the Mac P2P environment, whether Mac workstations can coexist and share files on a Windows LAN, etc. Probably they can. |
| • | The GUI environment is totally different. Since A-Shell's GUI is based on the WIN32 API, that isn't an easy nut to crack. And my guess is that since the Mac is mostly of interest as a workstation, users would likely want some GUI capabilities. Rewriting the GUI to use some higher-level, more portable framework (perhaps more HTML based) might have a lot of benefits, but is obviously a big job. |
| • | In 25 years or so, MicroSabio have had about five inquiries about using the Mac. So while that may not be a good indicator, it seems reasonable that the total possible sales of a Macintosh-based version of A-Shell would be a tiny sliver of the Windows sales. A-Shell business applications don't seem to overlap very much with the Apple world. |
In summary, we could probably get a plain text (Unix-like) A-Shell/ATE working in a hundred hours or so. Networking and coexistence with Windows PCs would probably double that. And GUI would be ten times that. Given that the sales income from such efforts would likely cover only tiny fraction of the costs, the Mac version of A-Shell is unlikely to ever get built.
