[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Paul Russell]

>
>1) The x86 kernel is already written and running. Darwin and mach 
>are both running in full on x86 hardware. Aqua is not as you said " 
>integral with the kernel" anymore than any other GUI is. Of course 
>it will require a recompile, everything will, but because of the 
>pure OO nature of Cocoa, that's all it will require. Recompile for 
>x86 and you're ready to go. This of course only applies to Cocoa 
>apps. Carbon apps will require a little more work as they compile to 
>PPC natively. But then again this isn't going to happen in 6 months 
>so developers will have time.

It's not quite that simple - I can a few issues:

(i) Endianness. PowerPC is big endian, x86 is little endian - lots of 
additional code will be needed for byte swapping file-based data, etc

(ii) AltiVec. I wouldn't mind betting that Quartz and other high 
performance chunks o' code are optimised for AltiVec, in which case 
they'll run like molasses on x86 hardware.

(iii) Carbon. Most apps are still only Carbon at best, not Cocoa. It 
will be years before this balance shifts in Cocoa's favour. Carbon on 
x86 would be a major enigneering challenge.

Paul

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