[OS X TeX] PPC to Intel
Bruno Voisin
bvoisin at mac.com
Wed Jun 8 11:38:47 CEST 2005
Le 8 juin 05 à 03:17, Rodrigo Banuelos a écrit :
> ...and so the question, for those who know best, will the transition
> from PowerPC to Intel be painless, as far as TeX (and all the
> related apps
> that we so cherish) is concerned?
Depends on which TeX you're thinking about:
- For Textures, painful: it seems Rosetta, which will allow PowerPC
apps to run on Pentium, won't support Classic. Of course, there's
always the possibility that Textures runs on OS X, eventually...
- For other TeXs, depends on whether they're optimized to use G4 or
G5 specific functions, that Rosetta won't support. If you look at the
doc <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/
universal_binary/universal_binary.pdf>, you'll see that Rosetta is
actually a G3 emulator, not more. For example telling, as Apple does,
to a scientist that Rosetta won't be good at FFT is like telling a
cook that an oven won't be good at heating food. Thus it feels like
Rosetta will be pretty much useless, except for the most basic tasks.
It's safer to assume that TeX apps won't actually require the Rosetta
emulation, and be ported instead to the Pentium (= become Universal
Binaries). If one is to believe Apple's doc and marketing blurb, for
Cocoa apps (TeXShop, iTeXMac, ...) the porting should be easy, and
for Carbon apps (OzTeX, CMacTeX, ...) a bit more difficult but still
manageable.
That's only frontends, though, and that leaves of matter of the TeX
engines (TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, ...). On this I've no idea. It depends,
I imagine, on some sort of support of the new platform by gcc. It
might also be an issue for OzTeX, which includes its own TeX binaries
compiled with another compiler (for the Modula-2 language IIRC).
Regarding the lack of support of Classic, which Apple seems to
confirm <http://news.com.com/Intel+deal+may+mean+end+to+OS+9+support/
2100-1045_3-5734410.html>, I feel personally very upset: Phil
Schiller from Apple has the attitude of telling "Hardly anybody uses
Classic anymore, so it's very low on our priority list". Very well. I
don't use Classic to do any new stuff, but I appreciate the
possibility of opening my old files from 15 years ago, written using
MacWrite, MacDraw/Claris Draw, Claris Resolve (and Textures), and
copying/reusing some of their content. Or using fonts in Mac OS 9
format (like my Lucida and MathTime fonts) under OS X.
Warning: I'm no developer, thus I may be completely wrong. And there
are issues that puzzle me: for example, the Pentium doesn't support
64-bit code, right? What will happen, then, of applications for which
a lot of the recent development efforts went precisely into
supporting 64-bit addressing for the G5?
Bruno Voisin--------------------- Info ---------------------
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