[G4] G5 and photoshop

[Joseph B. Gurman]

     Mr. Kunga wrote:

>Mr. Jobs and a developer demonstrated porting 32-bit applications to
>64-bit in a matter of minutes during his historic June 23rd SteveNote.
>It is from that presentation that I derived the idea that it is easy
>and quick to port applications to 64-bitness. Is that not what he told
>us? If you can't remember that part of the address, I will be happy to
>look it up and quote what was said. I have the whole thing on my hard
>drive.

     And Mr. Jobs has never, ever been known to distort reality the 
teensiest, weensiest bit?

     Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Xcode. I did not attend the 
WWDC, nor any other seminar on the subject. Does it look as though 
Xcode will speed the development process for new or ported code? 
Sure. Do the Xcode blurbs say anything about porting 32- to 64-bit 
code? Not that I can see at:

	http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/xcode.html .

     I've been through this cycle once before (when DEC Alphas first 
came on the scene). The compilers and header libraries were deficient 
the first couple of years; the task of making certain all pointers 
(which now had to be 64-bit types, not 32-bit) were declared as 
pointers, not 32-bit-long integers, was laborious for source code of 
any length; and the compatibility mode for running 32-bit code was 
abominable.

     I suspect Apple will do much better on accommodating 32-bit apps. 
I will speculate that a year from Panther's debut, the gcc compiler 
will be in really good shape. I'm nearly certain the pointers hunt 
will be the pacing item in conversion of code to take advantage of 
64-bit addressing. Easy and quick? Only on Steveworld.

     MY $0.02,

						Joe Gurman

P.S. Oh, but wait, this is OT: this is the G_4_ list. Sorry.
-- 
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."
                                                             - Douglas 
Adams, 1952 - 2001

Joseph B. Gurman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Physics
Branch, Greenbelt MD 20771 USA