On 17-Jun-2007, at 20:06 , Kevin Walzer wrote:
OK, I guess this means that 32-bit isn't going away any time soon. The Carbon-dev list seems to think that this announcement means Carbon is going the way of Classic. At least some of the people on that list saythat they will drop Mac support rather than port to Cocoa, because theyneed 64-bit. That's not directly germane to my concerns, as I don't think I need 64-bit for what I do.
The last sentence is the pit you'll fall in. At least, it's the pit that I'm scared of falling in.
Even though my own code would benefit little from 64 bits, it depends on all sorts of third party libraries (mainly media stuff in my case, but the same holds for many other fields). As soon as such a library gets a twofold performance increase from switching to 64bits it's going to be very tempting for me to follow suit.
And this works iteratively: as soon as I switch to 64bits then people using my stuff will have to follow too. And even the tiniest application nowadays uses layer upon layer of third party software. Indeed, 32 bit support isn't going to go away in the next 2 years, but the bell has tolled. Compare what happened to Windows programs when they switched from win16 to win32: even though win16 programs could technically continue to be run for a pretty long time they were cut off from new developments and either were ported or died.
But, all that said, I'm not scared of the 32-64 transition. For my own code it'll probably be comparable to the PPC-Intel transition: more work than you hope for but nothing as drastic as the OS9-OSX switch or the 68K-PPC switch. The only thing I'm a bit scared of is Apple's own useful toolkits that depend on Carbon, specifically QuickTime and AppleEvents. I'm not too sure about AE, but for QuickTime I know that you have to leave QTKit and switch to the old QuickTime API's very often if you do more than play a simple video. So effectively this'll mean that the "single toolkit for everything" paradigm will break, because Oldstyle-C-Quicktime will (in 64 bit space) lose it's ability to tweak the rendering so it'll be an edit- only API and QTKit will have to be used for rendering.
-- Jack Jansen, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jackIf I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
