[question] Building kitty for legacy macOS: old Cocoa or newer X11?

[barracuda156]

@kovidgoyal This is not a feature request, just a question. I understand that this will not be fixed here in upstream.

For legacy macOS (consider 10.6), would you advise trying to fix a very early Kitty release with native GUI or rather picking the last Go-free release and build it with X11? The caveat is that 10.6 does not support GL3.

Either is involving, so I’d appreciate an advice which may save my time and allow for a better outcome.

[kovidgoyal]

I have no idea, I am not a macOS user so I dont really keep track of how cocoa changes. The X11 approach will probably work fine assuming XQuartz or whatever provides OpenGL support at 3.1 minimum. The Cocoa approach will require stubbing or polyfilling various newer coca functionality/APIs. I suggest you start by running kitty under X11 on an up-to-date mac to check that the approach is viable.

[barracuda156]

Thank you for responding. OpenGL is capped at 2.1 (perhaps 2.0 even) on older macOS, at least native one. If Kitty ever supported 2.1, that can probably be restored. Not sure if it gonna work via mesa (it might, but perhaps will be suboptimal at best). X11 on its own should work fine, a lot of apps use it, including multimedia players.