As You Were

Devin Coughlin's blog.
Styles: Serious Spare

June 6, 2005

WWDC 2005 Keynote

So Apple is officially switching to Intel for its Macintosh line. They will have an Intel Mac shipping by June 2006 and expect to be fully transitioned by June 2007. They will use a dynamic translation engine (marketed as Rosetta) to translate PPC to x86. It doesn't sound like they will go the other direction.

This is big news, but as a practical matter it doesn't matter that much. Older, established companies will have to spend big bucks converting their programs to use the new build system, but newer projects should be a piece of cake to port. Most of my stuff should build on x86 out of the box, but my Unamed Compiler Project will need to be completely rethought. I've been thinking about targetting C (gross) or maybe Parrot. Grrrr. I'll be damned if I'm gonna learn x86 assembly. I've been totally spoiled by MIPS. Why the double-mint fuck can't we decouple process improvements with ISA? Goddamnit. That giant sucking sound down the hall is a crowd of Altivec wizards updating their resumes to apply for jobs at Microsoft and Sony.

So at WWDC 2005 there were no big hardware announcements, no big software announcements, nothing shiny to distract us with (although we were given an updated version of the backpacks they handed out last year -- now it has slots for pens, etc. in the small pocket), really nothing new but a Leopard timeframe (coincidental with Longhorn) and this Intel business. The keynote ran an hour short. iTunes' podcast support is cool, but I've been using NetNewsWire for that, anyway. I got totally radicalized by Democracy Now while driving here on I-80.

Onward and upward. Or — next year in Jerusalem.

Posted by coughlin at 1:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Comments

You're going to make fun of me either way... but will x86 binaries run under mac os (on an x86) at some point? Is that part of the plan?

For this to work it seems like apple needs to get in the business of java replacement... something I'm not sure they can (or should) pull off.

Let the fun making of ben begin:

Posted by: ben at June 6, 2005 3:42 PM

Yes, x86 binaries will run on an x86 Mac; they do on the test systems I've seen now. There is also a dynamic translator to convert PPC instructions to x86 on the fly, for programs that haven't been recompiled, similar (in concept at least) to the 68k emulator that made the PPC transition work. Performance of these non-native apps is not great, but not awful either. Certainly not a showstopper.

As for Java, I've basically come to the conclusion that Java on the desktop is dead, dead, dead, which is unfortunate, really. Since you can get at all the Cocoa APIs from scripting languages, it makes more sense to use them, going forward, if you don't won't to deal with managing universal/fat binaries and bytesex issues.

Posted by: Devin Coughlin at June 8, 2005 9:30 AM