MacOS Frotz users

Are there any MacOS Frotz users here comfortable with compiling stuff? Frotz has an ongoing problem with building and running on MacOS that I can’t properly address because I don’t have easy access to a Mac. This is one of the things I want to clear out before releasing version 2.45. Please check out https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/issues/98

It looks like MacOS compilation is fixed. Now what remains is to get semaphores working correctly because for some inexplicable reason Apple decided to remove support for unnamed POSIX semaphores from MacOS.

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I found an attempt at an honest answer by an Apple engineer in this mailing list post from 2009: https://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-kernel/2009/Apr/msg00010.html

It boils down to that there are some real technical problems, and it is not a top priority.

I read that post too. The technical explanation is not very convincing at all to me and smacks of “we’ll just take this out because it’s not strictly required.”.

Sorry to be the Apple apologist here. I was mainly surprised to find a semi-official explanation at all.

I’ll just note that most of the BSD subsystem in macOS is based on 4.4BSD from 1996, and was written long before the Linux way of doing things became the standard. So it is not really a matter of taking anything out, more a matter of not maintaining that part of the system.

Oh well. We have the semaphore problem fixed with some simple wrapper code that uses GCD semaphores for MacOS and unnamed POSIX semaphores otherwise.

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