As of today, MeshCAM is up and running on OSX. As you can imagine, this took a lot of effort but it’s working remarkably well right now.
As far as I know, this will make MeshCAM the first commercially-available CAM program on the Mac.
I still have lots of testing but I’ve been able to eliminate every functional bug that I’ve found so far. The only ones I know of are cosmetic and I do not expect to find any show stoppers that would make keep this port from becoming public.
This new development has a lot of effects even on the Windows version (most of them are good):
- The Mac version shares a code base with the Windows version so the Windows version was affected by the hundreds of tiny (and not-so-tiny) changes required to get the Mac version running.
- The Mac compiler (Clang) is very good at analyzing code so it’s likely that this will be helpful to preemptively find bugs that might otherwise make it out into the field.
- All of the external libraries that MeshCAM depends on were upgraded for this port. Updated libraries should not be a problem but any change that big can have consequences.
- There is some old code that I’ve left in MeshCAM for a long time because it works but the time has finally come to rip them out and simplify. The ASCII STL parser in particular is in need of a rewrite.