Instead of being put off by the announcement of Apple’s imminent switch to Intel chips, developers attending WWDC seemed to take the announcement in stride, with many predicting a smooth transition to new processor.
WWDC: Developers unfazed by Intel switch
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have to say when I watched the WWDC announcement via Webcast I was suprised how positive the developers were – a lot of applause, a lot of agreeing with Jobs.
I think for anyone to really comment on the whole Apple transition thing they really must watch the announcement. Before I watched it I had very negative views, but it does (as its designed to do) give you a much more positive perspective. In particular it should be noted how easy it was for Mathematica to port from PowerPC to x86 – the developers present don’t seem to have a problem at all with the situation – apple seem to be running this transition well so far from what i’ve seen.
And before anyone asks – no i’m not a mac user or mac zealot, i’m just a linux user who is a mac wannabe.
Yes, Apple appears to have gotten all their ducks in a row well before commiting to this switch.
I think this will prove to be a very smart move in the end.
iam affraid that everything Steve would have said would have benn welcomed with aplause
I think the fact that they got a program as complex as Mathematica working in about 2 hours put pretty much everybody at ease about the whole process. Of course if you’ve got Carbon apps written with the Metrowerks runtime, you’ve got some work ahead of you, which shouldn’t have surprised too many people. I think Apple saw the writing on the wall back during the G4 speed fiascos and decided to work on Plan B just in case the Switch to IBM G5s proved to be a failure.
All the people pulling their hair out about how tumultuous this transition is going to be should read this article. Anybody who knows squat about modern programming knows that with a reasonable amount of discipline it’s not hard at all to code for the same OS on many processors. Experienced programmers code this way *instinctively*. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go check out the number of apps in Yellowdog Linux and Fedora Core PPC.
This is not to say there won’t be *any* problems. People using Metrowerks may have trouble, but maybe Metrowerks will provide some sort of transition support themselves. But really, it seems like most of the interesting apps these days are written in Cocoa with XCode.
Besides, since porting is no serious problem, any company can still do it the oldfashioned way: issuing both the PPC and x86 versions. Sounds creepy and I suspect this will be more popular in OSS and shareware circles, but why not.
The cool thing is that they don’t have to issue two sperate versions for native PPC and x86. They just have to check off both boxes in xcode and it will compile both versions. Both versions get included in the same application package so that from a user’s perspective the same app runs natively on both platforms.