OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Applications

Porting question

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TNG999:
Hi all,

First of all, I am NOT a programmer...  I'm mainly a Microsoft-product administrator...  did OS/2 back in the hey-day and Novell.

As far as porting applications from Windows...  is it easier to port and maintain individual applications and needed libraries or would it be easier to port and maintain to ODIN?

Thanks for any info.....

-m

Dave Yeo:
Welcome TNG999,

Probably easier to port and maintain to Odin. Problem with Odin is not much has been done to it in quite a while. At one point it could run quite a few Win32 apps and things like Java and Adobe Acrobat were ported with it back in the day but MS has added lots of new API since.

TNG999:
Ahh ok...  Yes, makes sense you'd have to keep up ODIN with new libraries. 

Wish I was a programmer so I could help with porting......    Anything a non-programmer can do to help?

Thanks!

-m

Mentore:

--- Quote from: TNG999 on January 16, 2023, 11:37:30 pm ---Ahh ok...  Yes, makes sense you'd have to keep up ODIN with new libraries. 

Wish I was a programmer so I could help with porting......    Anything a non-programmer can do to help?

Thanks!

-m

--- End quote ---

Actually I think one of the biggest issues with Microsoft products is that most Windows programs are written in .NET.

.NET shares many similarities with the OS/2 SOM, from what I remember of the latter, but they have different dialects. What's worse is that .NET has become a full interface to the entire system, so porting an application would mean first of all porting all .NET to OS/2: and here comes the problem, since .NET is open source (and Linux has got it) but so big that we would require huge manpower to try and port it - then again, .NET is 64-bit aware, while OS/2 Kernel is not. This is just a quick handful of problems.

Mentore

Martin Iturbide:
Hi

Correct me if I'm wrong. Running an Win32 app on OS/2 with Odin, does not necesary means you are porting a Windows app to OS/2. For me it means you are running a Win32 binary that is being intepreted over OS/2 to run.

If a it is neded Windows application made in .Net to be ported to OS/2, it may be hard, the only way I know would be to porting first the Mono project, and later compiling the .Net application on OS/2. Currently we don't have Mono ported to OS/2.

If you want to port a different Windows application, that is not created in .Net, you should check the language and libraries that it uses. For example if it uses C and Qt5 and other libraries that we have ported to OS/2, that may be a good candidate to be ported.

But if you want to compile some little thing with OS/2, you may want to read this little article I wrote. "Compiling "OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming" Samples on 2016". You can compile a little test and then keep growing your knowledge from there.

Regards

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