On 2008-12-27 09:02:57 -0500, "Nick Sabalausky" <a...@a.a> said:
Ordinarily, I would agree with the need for PowerPC Mac support. But when one spends time in the Apple world, they really need to accept the fact that their systems will become abandoned at break-neck speed. That's just the way the Apple world works these days, and that will continue to be standard procedure for at least as long as Jobs in in charge.
Apple doesn't care much about backward compatibility for most of its own apps, but still provide means for developers to work with older versions of the Mac OS. Using Xcode 2.0, you can develop applications targeted at Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther, a PowerPC-only OS), even on an Intel Mac. And using Xcode 1.5, which was updated to work properly on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, you can support as far as Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).
I don't expect Apple to remove PowerPC support from its devlopment tools until a few more years. After all, Apple relies on these development tools to support their own apps that need to work on older OSs, like iTunes which still works on Panther.
It's true that most Apple apps and many third-party ones are only compatible with the two or three latest major operating system versions, but consider this: three major operating system versions would take us to Mac OS X 10.8 (10.6, Snow Leopard, being the first removing support for PowerPC), which can't really happen before 2012 or 2013. In the meanwhile, being able to compile apps only for Intel processors will be a disadventage for application developers choosing to work in D.
That said, I concede that it'd be a little silly to do a big investment in a PowerPC D compiler for Mac OS X. But it's sad that I won't be able to use an eventual DMD for Mac OS X unless I buy a new computer.
-- Michel Fortin michel.for...@michelf.com http://michelf.com/
