Forums | MacLife

The advantages of X Code are being played up because obviously Apple would prefer people to use their home grown development tools.  More than likely when it was said people with CodeWarrior are out of luck, it's because the current CodeWarrior can't create a universal binary or compile for Intel at all.  It's no fault of Metrowerks, they found the same day as the rest of the development community.  So I imagine Metrowerks just needs to retool CodeWarrior to make a universal binary and they'll be set.

Metrowerks will adapt.
A lot of developers prefer metrowerks because they can develop for os x, windows, and linux from the same project files.

It's just Apple not wanting to be dependent on them for the success of the platform. That's their whole rationale behind XCode.

Metrowerks creates tools for cross-platform development, so it will be relatively simple for them to support fat binaries in CodeWarrior. They handled the PPC transition very well.

Yep, Metrowerks made the split and moved over to Freescale.  Bought by Motorola and given to Freescale (sorta like AT&T "giving" the dial tone patent to Lucent Technologies).

From Metrowerks web site: Metrowerks

"Metrowerks recently sold its Intel x86 compiler and debugger technology to a third party. As a result, Metrowerks will no longer create and sell products that include this technology. Metrowerks will offer support for these products by hosting on-line discussions on newsgroups and on our web site.
This sale does not affect the right to use CodeWarrior or create x86 code by customers currently licensed to use CodeWarrior x86 compilers."

And why they pushed Mach-o.

PEF executables can't contain Intel code.

emacs wins... every time

assassin_bill wrote:

emacs wins... every time

You're a good man.

I have a hard time seeing Codewarrior for mac make it out of this alive.

Let me see if I get this right (easy explanation).

You can make a program using either CodeWarrior or XCode.  Each program has its own advantages/disadvantages.  The problem is in transferring Codewarrior stuff to XCode.  Something wonky will rear its head, simply because of the program switch.  The trick becomes to find those few lines of wonky code and fix it.

Either that or people should have stopped using CodeWarrior when XCode came out, like Apple tried to tell everyone.

after-life wrote:

And why they pushed Mach-o.

PEF executables can't contain Intel code.

I recall reading a rant blasting Apple for using such a RISC unfriendly format.

What do I mean by that? Mach-O ABI we see now used in Mac OS X is more or less a direct port of NeXT's Mach-O designed for m68k - it relies on PC (program counter) register to perform various manipulations with data (for the geeks: PC-relative addressing). There's nothing wrong with that, as its an effective and common practice, except for one little thing: there is no PC register in RISC processors (programmatically accessible). That is not a show-stopper though - Mach-O for PowerPC just takes one of 32 general purpose registers and turns it into a program counter-style register, to base all offset calculations off it. That works well, as you can see, as all of Mac OS X applications (except for the ones compiled with Carbon/CFM) use the Mach-O ABI.

That approach works well, except for one small thing: global/static data access adds about 7 cycle overhead per function, and about triple of that for cross-context calls (that is for the G4 class processor) compared to the old, Mac OS Classic ABI (excuse me for the geek talk). Mac OS Classic CFM ABI, in comparison, needed almost 0 cycles for static data access and about 5 for cross-context calls. To rephrase - applications in Mac OS X could be faster, if the Mach-O ABI followed the principles set for the PowerPC chip, and not the ones created over a decade ago for CISC ones.

[strike]Nokia bought the compiler.[/strike] Scratch that, they bought MW's symbian tools.

oh yeah, the piece I read wasn't on slashdot but it was macslash. close.

bah, no strike bbcode.

Last edited by Thunderstruck (2005-06-13 8:30 pm)