On Sep 17, 2006, at 9:29 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:
Just wondering: is it a good idea in the first place to create a universal 32/64 bit Python on MacOSX? On MacOS you don't pay a penalty or anything for running in 32-bit mode on any current hardware, so the choice of whether to use 32 or 64 bits really depends on the application. A single Python interpreter that can run in both 32 and 64 bit mode would possibly make this more difficult rather than easier. I think I'd prefer a situation where we have python32 and python64 (with both being ppc/ intel fat) and python being a symlink to either, at the end-users' discretion. For extension modules it's different, though: there it would be nice to be able to have a single module that could load into any Python (32/64 bit, Intel/PPC) on any applicable MacOSX version.
A 4-way universal python framework could be useful, but I agree that the python executable shouldn't be 64-bit. I'm not too happy about a symlink that selects which version you get to use, wouldn't 'python' (32-bit) and 'python-64' (64-bit) be just as good. That way the user doesn't have to set up anything and it helps to reinforce the message that 64-bit isn't necessarily better than 32-bit.
Having a 4-way universal framework would IMO be preferable over two seperate python installs, that would just increase the confusion. There are too many python distributions for the mac anyway. A major stumbling-block for a 4-way universal installation is the availability of binary packages for (popular) 3th party packages, this is not really relevant for python-dev but I'd prefer not having 64-bit support in the default installer over a 64-bit capable installation where it is very hard to get popular packages to work.
BTW. several sites on the interweb claim that x86-64 runs faster than plain x86 due to a larger register set. All my machines are 32-bit so I can't check if this is relevant for Python (let alone Python on OSX).
Ronald
-- Jack Jansen, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-devUnsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/ ronaldoussoren%40mac.com
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