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Mac on Intel
About Apple's planned move to Intel CPUs
Issue: 4.2 (November/December 2005)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz is the creator of the Monkeybread Software REALbasic Plugins.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,007
Starting Page Number: 40
Article Number: 4219
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
At the World Wide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs announced that Apple will start to move in the next year from Power PC based processors to processors made by Intel. What we currently know is that Apple has made testing machines for developers based on a Pentium IV chip and an aluminum G5 enclosure. So we can expect the new CPUs in the Intel Macs to be compatible with the Pentium IV, but next year Intel will certainly have better chips for Apple to deliver.
After this announcement, a lot of users and developers were confused. Questions were raised like, "Will REALbasic support compiling for these new Macs?", "What do I have to change in my applications?", and "Will plugins work?"
On the first question, REAL Software announced a day after Apple's announcement that they will support developing for Intel Macs. Since REALbasic has included a compiler for Intel's x86 architecture since 1999, they want to have a REALbasic version running and compiling for the new Intel Macs ready when the new machines ship.
The engineers from NeXT did a good job in allowing one executable file to contain several different code segments. Late versions of OpenStep (the operating system from NeXT) were able to support running on Intel x86, SPARC, and Motorola's 68k. So with the latest version of Xcode you can compile one single file to be able to run natively on Mac OS X for PPC and on Mac OS X for Intel. For the terminal fans: The Unix command line tool "file" will show you which code is included for a given executable file.
REAL Software can port the Mac OS X Mach-O runtime which REALbasic includes in every compiled application (for Mac OS X only) to Intel and use the existing x86 compiler from the Windows side to create a new target in REALbasic. This way it should be possible to compile for Mac OS X Mach-O based applications which include code for PPC and x86 Macs. The older PEF based applications will certainly not be created for Intel Macs, but you should be able to create an application bundle which includes a Mac OS Classic application (PEF based) and a Mac OS X only (Mach-O) application for PPC and x86. This way you can target all Mac users with Mac OS 9.x or newer, independent of their processors.
So let's say you all update to REALbasic 2005 and one of the REALbasic updates of summer 2006 adds the Intel Mac support. The 18 month update option in the store makes sense as you will be able to use the updated REALbasic version on the day it is available for download. Now the question is about plugin support. With the release of the first beta version of REALbasic for Intel Macs there will certainly be a plugin SDK, and this is when we can start porting plugins. Porting plugins will take some time as each plugin has to be tested after moving to Xcode 2.1 to compile them. For Monkeybread Software I can say that the Developer Transition Kit is ordered and should be delivered before you read this article so we can be done with most plugin parts before you get the first final REALbasic version with Intel Mac support.
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