It's really a great time to be a classic MacOS developer - tons of resources out there such as Retro68k, AmendHub, and a small but active community of people interested in sharing examples and help.
Back in the day when this stuff was modern I didn't have many resources or people to talk to about it, so exploring what could have been is an interesting endeavor.
Retro68 is indeed very cool, I started writing some Think C and it is fun to code on such a tiny screen but Retro68 allowing you to code on your regular dev environment using more modern C has been great. I've been playing around with it last week to make some applications (not a plug because these projects suck!) - If anyone wants a simple Retro68 application boilerplate to start off with:
I wasn't even alive when these computers were out but enjoying coding for them - something to be said about the simple interfaces (both in C and UI) and challenge of making things work with the constraints of the hardware.
Retro68 community has some really neat stuff like MacHTTP (https://github.com/antscode/MacHTTP) as well so you can offload some work to services (assuming you buy one of the many SCSI Wifi thingys).
I tried a little bit 20+ years ago. Bought a 'road Apple' Performa for $50, download Pangea's game programming book, can't remember if I used MPW or CodeWarrior...
It wasn't anywhere near as simple as DOS game programming was so I think I just installed YellowDog and used that Mac as a webserver.
I love retro68, but as much as I love it I'm frustrated the"black box" dependency on CMake to specify the build process + app metadata (e.g. distinguishing between apps and desktop accessories which treat system globals differently, rsrc compiling, resource fork creation, etc.) My first instinct with (hobbyist) programs is to go for a lean and mean makefile.
Maintainer of BlueSCSI here - this is really early/gathering info to implement, but glad there's interest! If you have one of these adapters and would like to help out please check the details in the ticket.
Was great to see the video[0] you did (and production quality, humor, etc) showcasing MacProxy Plus. As the BlueSCSI maintainer it's always exciting to see it being used the wild in cool new things like this!
This app started from our retro programming study group[1] where we're going through the 1992 book "Macintosh C Programming Primer" (come jump in anytime!). Some of us are using real machines (we collect them, also I'm working with SCSI so I need real hardware) or you can grab a premade image and start coding. There's also gcc cross compiler Retro68[2] where you can develop on a modern machine.
How does the dev tooling work? Rebuild & restart the app each time? I find working on any sizable codebase this can take minutes even on the latest spring-boot. Quakrus has an interesting live reloading classloader.
Rebuild and restart. Javalin itself starts in milliseconds (the test suite starts and stops servers across 600+ tests in less than 10 seconds). If you run in debug mode in IDEA, or use some hot-swapping tool like dcevm or jrebel, you won't always need to restart. I don't think there will ever be a dedicated tool provided by Javalin for this.
