"On the whole, I bought the story too, although I know that it won't all go smoothly. Anyone who owns or is considering buying a Mac has to have questions; these are what I think the answers are."
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Member since:2005-07-07
Yes you can. Most applications will take very little time to port from PPC Mac OS X to x86 Mac OS X. A simple recompile, with the correctly checked tick box.
if you have a Mac, you can try it for yourself. If you don't have a Mac, get hold of one and try it. Mathematica ported their application in a few hours.
Porting to Mac OS X from another OS though, is a different beast altogether.
Member since:2005-07-06
Saterdaies, this is not totally true.
Apps written in Java will (for the most part) just work.
Apps written in C, C++, Coco, or Objective-C apps, will need to be tweeked and recompiled, but little changes should be needed.
MetroWerks developers will have a much harder time. They need to fist port to Xcode and that, depending on your app, could be painful.
Many Xcode and Carbon developer, who were at the Worldwide Developers Conference tried porting their apps with the help of Apple and walked away with long lists of bugs.
I think the migration is a great idea, and for most people will be easy, but not for everyone.
Member since:
2005-07-07
Oy, people don't really seem to get these - at least the people writing articles. Of course, they aren't programmers. Any programmer worth anything can tell you that you can recompile programs for different processor targets with no changes (unless you have done something weird). For example, I can compile Generic Linux Program A for x86 or PowerPC with no changes to the source code. What I can't do is compile Generic Linux Program A for Mac OS or Windows without changes.
But, of course, article writers are treating this like porting from one OS/API to another with some magic Apple voodoo that may or may not work as planned. That isn't the case.
Now, there are a lot of people also saying that more programs will be ported because it will be easier because of the switch. With the possible exception of games, this just isn't true. The PowerPC processor was not the item stopping the porting of applications like Opera, MS Office, etc. The problem was that Mac OS X is a different OS. There are always ways around this, like using a language like Python and a Tk GUI, but they aren't so widely used. Now, with games, about a third of the work is endian issues (byte order). This will be solved, but they will still have to port from DirectX (if used) to OpenGL and from the Win32 API to Apple's (Carbon, Cocoa).
For 99% of applications, it is just checking the two boxes since there won't be an OS differences on the two platforms. Drivers and games are different.