Right now Gargoyle is capable of being built so that it can run at least as far back as Sierra (10.12). For two reasons, I’m eventually going to bump that up to something newer (at least to Catalina):
Older MacOS releases don’t support more modern C++ versions, limiting the ability to use them in Gargoyle + interpreters.
Homebrew doesn’t support older MacOS releases, and at some point will probably fail to work.
#1 isn’t necessarily the end of the world: it just means I can’t use various language features which make life nicer.
#2 will ultimately be a hard line. If I ever can’t easily get an older MacOS build environment running, that’s the end of older builds. In short, if Homebrew stops working properly, I won’t be able/willing to invest time trying to hack around it.
So my question is this: is there anybody here using Gargoyle on a MacOS release that predates Catalina? I really don’t want to leave anybody out in the cold, so as long as I can support older versions, I’ll do my best to, as long as there are users.
I really hate to make life more difficult for volunteer developers, but yes I am using Gargoyle on Mojave(10.14.3). And Gargoyle is my default interpreter package. Since 2022 version Gargoyle’s font rendering on MacOS is so crisp I am kinda in love with it.
@cas Thanks, it’s very thoughtful of you to ask. Overall, there are lots of older builds of Gargoyle available that will continue to run on older OSes, aren’t there? So nobody will go backwards or lose the ability to use Gargoyle. Those users will stop going forwards in additional features or bug fixes, but the fundaments are already in those older versions. Maybe the last big change to external eyes like mine was the retina/sharper font powers. I already forget how long ago that was.
Incidentally, if anyone’s looking for a practical triage of Mac versions of Gargoyle, I maintain one on my Six downloads page: Download & Play Six offline
No problem at all; it’s more important that Gargoyle be usable than it is for me to use newer language features. I won’t be able to do much if/when it becomes technically impossible to build, but otherwise I’ll do what I can to ensure Gargoyle remains usable to everybody who wants it.
Yes, that’s true, and it’s nice that Gargoyle is at least close enough to feature complete (excluding new interpreters, e.g. Frankendrift) that if somebody were forced to use the current version indefinitely, it’d do the job well enough.
But even so, if it’s not too much of a burden to support older operating systems, I’ll do so as much as possible.
