C++, A/UX, and Mac OS

[Mark H. Richer]

Is anyone using C++ on A/UX?
So far I know of two sources of C++ for A/UX:
(1)  I spoke with someone from Oasys that said that they are shipping
their C++ 1.2 (binary) product for A/UX now. I believe it is $795. Has anyone seen
it on A/UX?

They claim that they have fixed some of the bugs in 1.2 and that they
have written a more efficient front-end.  Has your experience shown
that Oasys' version of C++ is substantially better than what AT&T
ships with source?

(2) For $2,000 we (as a commercial entity) could license the source
code from AT&T and port it ourselves. The main advantage is that we
could try to port it to the Mac OS as well as to A/UX. That would be
very important to us. Has anyone tried porting the AT&T sources to
A/UX or Mac OS? I would imagine that porting to A/UX should be easy
enough. Would it be a lot more difficult porting it to the Mac OS?  In
actuality, C++ on the Mac OS is more important to us (primarily
because there are 2 million machines out there running the Mac OS and
only a handful running A/UX right now), but we'll take what we can get
first.

Are there any other alternatives?

I know that Apple is working on MPW C++ for the Mac OS, but will we
see it this decade? Apparently the product release is delayed and last
I heard Apple might not even start alpha testing until the end of the
year. I suspect the delays are on the AT&T end. WE need another
alternative ---- and developing with C++ under A/UX is a
consideration, perhaps the only consideration at this point in time.

What are we doing?

We are developing an application framework and user interface toolkit
for the Macintosh (a commercial product).  Although somewhat similar
in concept and intent, there are some significant differences between
our framework and Apple's MacApp. Of course one major difference is
that our toolkit is written in object-oriented C rather than Object
Pascal (it is true that MPW C++ is supposed to interface with MacApp,
but we feel we can provide a better alternative).  And we plan to
offer a version that compiles under A/UX-- something you cannot do
with MacApp at present.  So far we have been using a "home-grown"
pre-processor to do object-oriented programming in C, thinking that
Apple's C++ would have been here long ago. Now we need to start
porting to C++ because we want to demonstrate the toolkit at MacWorld
in January. And we'd hate to have to demonstrate a version which is
not in C++ if that's what the product will ultimately use (and so far
I can't think of a better alternative). 

If you are interested in our toolkit send me a note --- I'll answer
whatever questions I can and keep you up-to-date on the status of the
project.  Don't expect to see it released before the second quarter of
1989, but I hope we can start outside testing by the end of the year.
We plan to alpha/beta test the C++ version so the timing depends
partly on how and when we can port our stuff to C++.

Mark Richer
Mountain Lake Software, Inc.
1041 Lake Street
San Francisco, CA 94118