Linked by Jeremy T. Fox on Fri 11th Jul 2003 16:55 UTC
A recent article by Tony Smith from The Register titled "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther will not be a 64-bit OS" caused a good deal of confusion with many people, including me. It is also caused a heated argument here on OSNews. The basic point of the article is that Mac OS 10.2.7 and 10.3 are not "true" 64-bit OSes, but the article does not clearly explain what a "true" 64-bit OS is. This had led to a lot of claims that the article is false or misinformed, rather than just unclear, which is certainly is.
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If one really wanted 64-bit applications on a G5 and wanted to address > 4GB of memory, could one use a 64-bit PPC Linux? Does such a thing exist? Is it stable? Do 64-bit Linux applications such as gcc exist for PPC? That could be an answer for some people in the short term if they really need 64-bit addressing. Then again, that wouldn't work for people who depend on mac applications or proprietary applications that are compiled for specific archetectures (like Linux x86). However, if you are developing your own apps using gcc or whatnot Linux could be a solution for you. I am not suggesting this for the long term, but, if you need 64-bit NOW, Linux could be a viable option.
As an aside, if you really expected Panther to be fully 64-bit, I think that you were deluding yourself. It takes time to make a 64-bit kernel and userland, and I am glad that Apple is taking the time to get it right rather than releasing something half-baked just to get it out. You wouldn't want to be stuck with some crappy 64-bit ABI that you had to live with because Apple took shortcuts early on. Windows 95 wasn't fully 32-bit at first, OS/2 wasn't fully 32-bit at first, Solaris wasn't fully 64-bit until Solaris 8 and Solaris was running on 64-bit hardware for years. I could go on with examples, but, to sum it up, while this news is disapointing, it is not unexpected.
Oh, one final last note. If you really really need 64-bit now in MacOS X, and you have some kernel hacking knowledge, perhaps you could hack something together in Open Darwin, the source is available.
Skipp