It is not so much of an issue anymore. If tool developers follow a reasonable set of design rules most tool applications will run on Windows, MacOS, HPUX, Spark and Linux under many different windows emulators with essentially no performance hit. When we (Byte Craft) realized that just by being disciplined with the design rules we used we could support many different platforms with few penalties and more important a reasonable expectation that the tools would perform in the same manner on each of them. There are some additional design considerations that multiplatform support needs to consider with this approach the best known is line termination support differences between windows and unix based platforms.
Multiplatform support is also one of several reasons that all of our code generation tools can be called from a command line and combined to other tools in a tool set.
This has been our approach and of course it means that pricing for all platforms is the same as a result.
Regards
Walter Banks
-- Byte Craft Limited Tel. (519) 888-6911