Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!intercon!news
From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: Re: A/UX Release 2.0 (long)
Message-ID: <1990Mar22.192255.12449@intercon.com>
Date: 22 Mar 90 19:22:55 GMT
References: <239@inpnms.UUCP> <2863@unisoft.UUCP> <14743@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <1990Mar22.152002.15159@athena.mit.edu>
Sender: news@intercon.com (USENET The Magnificent)
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Sterling, VA
Lines: 25

In article <1990Mar22.152002.15159@athena.mit.edu>, vpsingha@athena.mit.edu
> Even after reading numerous postings about the power of the A/UX
> operating environment, I still haven't seen the answer to one
> question: under A/UX 2.0, can applications be written that take
> advantage of BOTH the Macintosh toolbox and Unix library calls (e.g.
> fork ())?  Can such "hybrid" programs be written with existing tools
> like MPW?  Or, are programs that use the Mac toolbox restricted to
> residing in the "compatibility" layer, unable to use the
> multiprocessing (and other) capabilities of Unix?

You can indeed write applications that use both native A/UX facilities and
the Toolbox.  I'm not entirely clear about whether these end up in
the "virtual Macintosh" process or in their own UNIX processes, however.
The easiest way to write these seems to be to make an MPW library that's
the equivalent of A/UX's "libc.a", so that a Mac application can call A/UX
system calls (Apple is calling such a library "a third party opportunity
:-)").  This is what CommandShell is--it's a Mac application that can
open pipes and fork off other processes...

--
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation

"Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view."
	--Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Return of the Jedi"