While working on MacSim, my AVR simulator for OSX, I started thinking about how I might go about implementing a serial port peripheral so that the simulated AVR could communicate with the outside world. This turns out to be quite a difficult problem on OSX. However after quite a bit of trial and error I managed to get it at least partially working.
Unfortunately there are no working examples available that I can find to see what might be preventing it fully working. All old examples from Apple are way out of date and don’t compile at all. I seem to have reached a point where it is a bit beyond me and have open sourced the project in the hope that someone might be able to figure out what is wrong. The project page is here and the source is hosted on GitHub.
UPDATE MARCH 2020: With MacOS 10.15 ‘Catalina’ the entire approach to handling serial ports and other low level software has changed completely, so it is unlikely that I will spend any time improving this.