[vorbis-dev] Optimisations

[David A. Gatwood]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Chris Hanson wrote:

> At 5:26 PM -0800 11/16/00, David A. Gatwood wrote:
> >The gcc extensions are official Apple-sanctioned extensions.  If
> >CodeWarrior doesn't support them yet, it almost certainly will.  By the
> >time OS X becomes final, I suspect those extensions will be so
> >indoctrinated in MacOS software that they won't have much choice.
> 
> To my knowledge, CodeWarrior supported *Motorla* AltiVec extensions 
> before GCC did.

I didn't say they were written by Apple.  I said Apple-sanctioned.  I
don't keep up much with which team did the design.  :-)

> Also, you speak as if you believe most Macintosh development will be 
> done with GCC by the time Mac OS X becomes final.  This is incorrect; 
> Metrowerks CodeWarrior will be the standard compiler and development 
> environment for Macintosh developers for a long time to come. 

Allk I can say is that, as a developer, I know which one I'll be using.
I've used both, but CodeWarrior is, in my experience, horribly bloated and
slow for what it does.

> Apple's ProjectBuilder is not a very good development environment, 
> and none of the tools Apple ships support building PEF binaries.
> 
> (PEF is the executable and library format used on MacOS 9.  If you 
> write Carbon applications and use PEF rather than Mach-O as your 
> binary format, your applications will run natively on both MacOS 9 
> and Mac OS X.  For most companies, this is a commercial necessity.)

I totally disagree.  Here's why....  I just bought about $1000 dollars of
hardware to work with my new laptop -- everything from a serial adapter to
SCSI.  NONE -- not even one -- of the devices work with anything before
MacOS 9.  I suspect that MacOS X will quickly be installed on a sufficient
hardware base so as to make MacOS 9 support largely moot within the first
year or so.  As this becomes obvious, the need to use proprietary tools
like CW will diminish, and free tools will look more and more interesting
to developers.

On that note, one of my pet projects that's currently backgrounded for
lack of time is porting Darwin (the core of OS X) to pre-PCI PowerMacs.
Once OS X runs on everything, the reasons for not switching to it will
largely be moot as well.

Late,
David

---------------------------------------------------------------------
                    Check out my weekly web comic:
                     http://www.techmagazine.org

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-dev-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.