OSX and 64-bit [Re: First working Win64 program!]

Paulo Pinto pjmlp at progtools.org
Mon Aug 13 02:25:29 PDT 2012


On Monday, 13 August 2012 at 07:05:11 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-08-12 at 23:29 -0700, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> […]
>> OSX has a lot less backwards compatibility to worry about.
>
> Not entirely true.
>
> <semi-rant>
> Apple's strategy appears to be that computers are 
> non-upgradable,
> non-repairable, disposable items that last until the next 
> release:
> everyone is supposed buy the latest version as soon as it comes 
> out and
> so be on the latest kit(*). Therefore Apple don't care about 
> backward
> compatibility in the way some other manufacturers do, e.g. JDK 
> for the
> last 17 years. Of course sometimes this backfires, cf. many 
> white
> MacBooks which have 64-bit processors but 32-bit boot PROMs. 
> OSX detects
> this and will not boot 64-bit. This leads to extraordinary 
> problems
> trying to compile some codes where the compiler detects 64-bit 
> processor
> and assumes a 64-bit kernel API. To build some applications I 
> first have
> to build the whole compiler toolchain so as to deal with this 
> mixed
> chaos.
>
> (*) And as we know there are a lot of people who actually do 
> this, which
> is why there is a great market in second hand Apple kit, which 
> is fine
> for me, since it is reasonable kit at a reasonable price. 
> Unlike new
> kit.
> </semi-rant>

It is this type of issues that keeps me away from Apple products.



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