I knew when I started working on Gateware that there was going to be a steep learning curve to go from Windows-only development to cross-platform, but I didn't expect to have nearly as many issues with it as I've had. I've spent an entire week trying to get a testing window running on Mac to be able to test options for blitting, but it took four days straight to get so much as an empty window running without halting progress through the program.
Getting a test running in Linux was a hurdle, but doing the same for Mac is turning out to be more like trying to jump over a skyscraper. Before I could even start trying to write any code, I had to learn a new language, since Mac uses Objective-C for the most part instead of C++. Official documentation is sparse and next to useless for understanding anything but syntax, and other sources like StackOverflow depend entirely on user responses to questions having accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information, which is almost never the case. It's been hard to even narrow down options to test because of the large number of conflicting recommendations I've found. Most of the code examples provided by people are either too old and use things that are now deprecated or are for Swift, which Gateware doesn't use. It's as if Apple changes everything all the time to make sure nobody quite knows how to write software for Mac outside of Apple.
Something I've proven countless times is that no matter how hard a problem is, the most important part of solving it is persistence. If you refuse to give up and stop looking for more ways to solve a problem, you'll eventually find something that works. My goal is to have a functional proof of concept for both Linux and Mac by the end of next week.
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