Unfortunately creating a 64-bit Mac version of the viewer is not quite as
simple as just recompiling it into a 32/64-bit universal binary. Right now the
viewer relies on some of the Carbon APIs which are only available in 32-bit, to
produce a 64-bit version will mean transitioning to using the Cocoa
equivalents, mixing in a greater amount of Objective-C than the viewer contains
now to do so. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but still a fair amount of work.
I would imagine it is more than is reasonably justifiable from a cost vs
immediate benefit point of view within the Lab, compared with other priorities
right now. It is probably harder to justify the development effort than 64-bit
Windows and Linux versions, as we don't tend to have the same 32/64-bit
compatibility headaches on OS X.
Having said that (which I know probably all makes me sound a bit of a wet
blanket) it will still need to happen at some point, and open source
development and Snowglobe are an excellent solution and home for the project to
make it happen sooner. I have already started the ground work by committing a
few fixes to make Snowglobe compile cleanly against all of the 10.4, 10.5 and
10.6 SDKs (although there is still one remaining issue SNOW-223 which requires
patching APR to make it play nicely with the 10.6 SDK, as well as 10.4 and
10.5).
Even with the use of universal binaries to support both 32-bit and 64-bit
versions, it can be quite a headache to maintain compatibility across all of
10.4.11 (the current official minimum requirement)), 10.5 and 10.6 especially
if (when!) we wish to start using some of the newer features of Leopard and
Snow Leopard, which is probably where the greater benefits lie, probably much
more so than 'simply' moving to 64-bit. It would interesting to know how many
people are actually still using the viewer on 10.4, especially Snowglobe (don't
worry people, I'm not suggesting you're insignificant and should be immediately
abandoned :)
Aimee.
_______________________________________________
Policies and (un)subscribe information available here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev
Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
