Compiling for PowerPC and Intel-based Macs

I just received an ADC email with this as the main topic along with lots of other stuff.

Apples are nice to develop on out of the box as you can do quite a bit with what you get on the machine and from Apple's website or elsewhere.

Except for the x86 stuff. The part-time programmer or hacker that writes a little tool or wants to port some open source code isn't going to shell out a grand to rent an old Pentium 4 system.

Anything that I do on the Mac OSX platform is going to be using the free tools for the PowerPC platform. If they want the small developer to start looking at their future platform, then they should give out a development platform for free to the small guys too.

Even Microsoft has learned this lesson.

Well this would require you to be on a x86 chipset.... Use the universal binary feature in XCode.

I have plenty of x86 systems. But I like to work at the vector code level and I don't think that the unversal binary thingie does altivec.

mmoy said:

...If they want the small developer to start looking at their future platform, then they should give out a development platform for free to the small guys too.

Even Microsoft has learned this lesson.

Click to expand...

Cool! Where can I get my free Windows development platform? I could use a free PC and a copy of Visual Studio.

Get the Express Edition of Whidbey at microsoft.com. Comes with Visual Studio and your choices of languages.

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

They have Visual Web Developer, Visual Basic, Visual C++, C#, SQL Server and J++.

mmoy said:

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

They have Visual Web Developer, Visual Basic, Visual C++, C#, SQL Server and J++.

Click to expand...

That's still just the software.

Microsoft charges for MSDN access too. For example, access to the latest Longhorn betas requires an OS-level subscription ($699.) And that doesn't include a box to run it on, like the OS X/Intel package does.

Apple gives away XCode 2.1, which can cross-compile for Intel. No, it can't do SSE optimization; you'll need actual Intel hardware for that. And, so far, there is no Apple/Intel hardware, except for the stuff available to paid members.

I would try to get one of those developer boxes if they weren't a rental...

I downloaded Whidbey and use it to build Mozilla. I also downloaded Windows XP 64-bit edition. I'd be happy if Apple provided just the software. The operating system and developer tools would be fine.
You can get a Windows box for about $350. And you get to keep it.

technologist said:

That's still just the software.

Microsoft charges for MSDN access too. For example, access to the latest Longhorn betas requires an OS-level subscription ($699.) And that doesn't include a box to run it on, like the OS X/Intel package does.

Apple gives away XCode 2.1, which can cross-compile for Intel. No, it can't do SSE optimization; you'll need actual Intel hardware for that. And, so far, there is no Apple/Intel hardware, except for the stuff available to paid members.

Click to expand...

I want to do my own hand-coded SSE optimization. Kind of hard to translate that from a PowerPC.