Is there some sort of tool or helper to port an MFC/C++ app to OS X/Cocoa?

Question

I have a significant codebase written in MFC and am tasked with creating a port for Mac OS X. I know that I'm going to have to roll up my sleeves at some point and do alot of grunt work to get everything working correctly, but are there any tools out there that might get me partway?

Answer 1

Honestly, the models are so different that I suspect you're going to need to do a nearly complete re-code at least of most of the UI parts.

Answer 2

No, Such a tool would be pretty much impossible to write.

MFC and Cocoa are such fundamentally different platforms there is no easy way to convert between the two.

Depending on how you've written your applications, you will either need to write the GUI portion of your code or even the whole codebase.

Answer 3

I'm working on one.

From the GUI point of view, the new version of AppMaker is based around an import/generate model. Most of commercial work I've done with AppMaker has been the other way, porting Macintosh applications to Windows. However, there's no reason why the same principles can't be applied in reverse.

AppMaker v2 had a very good importer for PowerPlant UI resources and traditional Mac dialogs. As it is only able to run on Classic, that code base has been discarded (you really don't want to know) and the final generator languge I wrote for AppMaker v2 is an XML exporter which dumps the entire object model to an extended XAML.

I already have a XAML UI generator and am currently working on a Cocoa xib generator - one of the reasons for going to WWDC in June. The focus at this time is on import/generator suites before returning my attention to a GUI editor.

I wrote PP2MFC to allow PowerPlant applications to be compiled for Windows - a cross-platform solution needed because no other framework or cross-platform tool at the time (1997) would perform well enough for the hardware requirements. I've since discussed an opposite program with someone I could chase up and I'm sure an MFC portability layer could be created to map to Cocoa objects. Whilst many developers have a poor opinion of MFC's message-map architecture, the heavily macro-based API sits on top of a reasonably clean OO framework.

This is the kind of project where you need to think about long-term maintainability - do you want something which ends up as large chunks of MFC code working with Cocoa or do you want to migrate to an idiomatic Cocoa program.

Any further discussion should probably be taken off SO - contact me at dent at oofile.com.au but I'm happy to debate technicalities and feasibility on here. The combination of code generation and skinny framework adaptor layers works better than most people expect.