I was able to port many of my screensavers to other platforms easily; in most cases, the savers just have two functions: setup() and draw(), the first of which does any one-time initialization, the second which does all per-frame rendering. One can write a simple wrapper for any platform that initializes the GL contexts and handles user input, as well as any locking/unlocking code.
However, I don't think that would achieve much. Most of the savers were written in very terse, nasty form to achieve the various constraints the authors worked under.
I think it makes more sense to make NuSaver: the design I described (a scene graph, a physics engine, and a bytecode VM, then rewrite the good savers in the VM). In this case, I would probably just adopt an existing C++ scene graph (Qt has one built-in), a physics engine (I adapted Box2D to Qt, but you need a 3D engine), and a VM (I would use javascript).
Yes, this is what I meant. How big a justification does he need to refuse code when such a thing is possible?
But my point is that maybe he has reasons other than being a jerk. If it isn't worth it to you to do it otherwise, why does the discussion start with it being worth it to him?
He's often right (see CADT) but in a way that is jerkish, and that's really limited the adoption of jwz code.
(he seems to port xscreensaver to all the things he uses, so I can understand not wanting to accept a huge pile of someone else's code in a different language than the rest of the package)