Other platforms. (MacOS)

[jimLee]

I really love the simplicity of the Arduino IDE and the entire idea of setup()..loop(). What I REALLY would like, it to use it to write code for my Mac. Somewhat like processing, but with c++, not java.

A graphics toolkit like Adafruit's GFX library, something for keyboard & mouse events, disk library.. Away we go. Possibly even make it cross platform?

Anyway, that's my idea. I would be just tickled to have a tool like that.

-jim lee

[pert]

I think it should be possible to create a hardware core that will add support for compiling programs for MacOS via the Arduino IDE. The Arduino IDE's "Upload" functionality could be repurposed to run the compiled executable.

[jimLee]

Hardware core? Can you go a little deeper into detail what you mean by this? Is this the backend part of the compiler?

-jim lee

[pert]

By "hardware core", I mean the package of files and tools that adds support to the Arduino IDE for specific hardware. Examples of "hardware cores" are:

• Arduino AVR Boards (which comes with the Arduino IDE): Provides support for the official AVR boards like Uno, Mega, Leonardo, etc.
• Arduino SAMD Boards: Provides support for Zero and MKR Boards
• ESP8266 Core for Arduino: Provides support for ESP8266 boards
• Arduino core for the ESP32: Provides support for ESP32 boards.

Hardware cores define the boards that will be added to the Arduino IDE's Tools > Board menu after they are installed as well as the tools and recipes that will be used to compile and upload for those boards. The will also generally contain a core library, where the standard Arduino API functions are defined, since these definitions are often architecture-specific. The Arduino IDE allows a lot of flexibility in the configuration of hardware cores. I don't see any reason why you couldn't set one up to compile sketches for the MacOS target, though of course you're either going to need to leave out things like digitalWrite, or else find innovative ways of interpreting that functionality.

For more information, have a browse through the hardware core repositories linked above, using the Arduino Hardware Specification as a reference:
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki/Arduino-IDE-1.5-3rd-party-Hardware-specification

[jimLee]

In the "old days" Mac OS 1-9 you could glue your libraries to the Mac Toolbox calls. I have no idea if that kind of thing is even supported anymore.

-jim lee