At 11:01 PM -0500 01/21/2006, Donald Keenan wrote:
Is it true that almost all software will have to run via Rosetta? The WSJ review gave me that impression. I guess with the exception of the bundled Apple apps Apple has ported already.
There are very few "universal" (x86 and ppc) binaries available at this point. I see the number of freeware and shareware x86 builds growing daily. But the commercialware is a slow trickle at best.
Anything that uses altivec or certain G4- or G5-specific instructions has to be rewritten. Ditto for things that talk to the system preference panes, and kernel extensions, as well as the kernel extensions themselves. That means a LOT of work for 3rd party hardware companies.
Another thing slowing it down is a number of run-time and comipler bugs in the developer tools from Apple. We're discovering that it's not enough to just do a universal compilation, as Apple's PR says. You cannot trust the code that works fine on PPC to work on x86. So you need a real x86 Mac for testing. In the old 68k->PPC days, this type of problem occured too - but was fixed before the first PPC machines shipped.
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