On 15 jan 2005, at 17:43, Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
It looks very much as if the code for the 1.9.6 compiler on Windows/XP and Mac/OS is different - in fact it looks as if the Mac version is an earlier release.
They are compiled from the same sources.
How could this have happened? Should I download the compiler and compile it from scratch, or is it likely that somebody will fix the problem?
I will have a look at it.
While on the subject, of compiling the compiler. I have a dual 64-bit CPU on my Mac. Would it be possible to compile the compiler to run in 64bit mode and be multi-threaded - and produce code that is 64bit and multi-threaded?
There is no 64 bit powerpc code generator in the compiler yet. A compiler also does not "produce multi threaded code". There is some research on the topic of automatically turning single threaded code into multi threaded code, but generally I do not know of any production compiler which can automatically turn a generic single threaded program into a multi threaded program.
In the foreseeable future, it's still the programmer which has to explicitly write multi threaded code. This is far from trivial, and as a result writing both highly efficient and 100% multi threaded code is very difficult for all but the most simple examples.
I know that Tiger will provide full 64bit operation (at least that is promised),
No, it's not promised and it won't. No 64 bit versions of the standard GUI libraries will be provided, only of most (command line) generic unix libraries. See http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/64bit.html
but, in theory, the compiler should be able to produce 64bit code now. If not, how long before this will be possible? Is it difficult to do?
I don't know when I will start with it, I'm currently still fixing things for the 32 bit code generator. Also, there are two different 64 bit things you can do: 64 bit mathematics, and 64 bit memory spaces. The former can already be done under Mac OS X 10.3 (but is not supported by our compiler yet either), the latter will only be possible from 10.4 onwards (and initially not for GUI programs, as mentioned above).
Jonas
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