Plans for official support for Mac OS X

Forums: 

Greetings,

I am curious as to whether official support for Mac OS X is planned?

I am willing (and hopefully able) to help.

I was successful (without OpenGL support) this morning in building OCCT 6.5.2 on my Lion based MacBook Pro.
I am in the process of patching the source code to account for the OpenGL header location discrepancies and hope to have that running by the weekend.

kind regards,

terje

Andrey BETENEV's picture

Hello terje,

Currently we do not have plans to include MacOS to the list of certified platforms for OCCT; the main reason for that is absence of demand for it from our customers. However OCCT is designed to be portable, and we know that some members of the community have successfully built and used OCCT on MacOS.

We encourage you and other contributors to provide changes that could facilitate OCCT usage on non-official platforms. In the future, when we have test tools and public repository available, we will welcome volunteers who could take care of maintaining OCCT operable on such platforms.

Andrey

P.S. Sorry for having no time to answer before...

Stefan Boeykens's picture

FWIW, the Open Cascade Community Edition (OCE) has decent support for OSX. It would be good it the disparate efforts of end users to make OCC run nicely and clean on OSX would be combined.

Currently, it is possible to run the libraries, but all the OpenGL stuff is tied to an X11 system, which is not native enough for end users.

I have described my experience using the OCE version on OSX (Snow Leopard at the time of writing) in my blog at:
http://cad-3d.blogspot.com/2011/10/pythonocc-open-source-interactive-cad...

The process was a real pain, as it required a whole large bunch of Linux libraries (including many that were already available in the official OSX system) to get an X11 graphical view going with Qt. Frankly, when I cleaned up my Macbook Pro beginning this year, I removed everything.

A proper OSX support would mean that it could run in a "real" OpenGL context, e.g. Qt-mac (not Qt-x11) and Cocoa. There has been some success but so far, none of it seems to be flowing back into the "official" OpenCASCADE.

Architects and designers have a reasonably large amount of Mac users.

jelle's picture

I'm thrilled to see a Cocoa backend [1] in the works!
That's excellent news OCC devs!
Thanks for this effort, excellent.

[1] http://git.dev.opencascade.org/gitweb/?p=occt.git;a=commit;h=4fe56619213...