On May 28, 2006, at 12:22 AM, Miller Puckette wrote:

> Yep... I thought 'imac' meant 'intel-mac' but I guess it doesn't.
>
> Anyway, I think that if someone wants to publish an extern that works
> on either mips or i86 macs, they would have to include both
> "dylib"s...
> unless there's a way to make a fat dylib with binaries for both
> architectures.

Apple provides two mechanisms for this, one is fat binaries, which
have been supported since NeXTSTEP 3.2 (Mac OS X 10.4 == NeXTSTEP
6.4), and the other is Rosetta, which runs PPC code in emulation.
NeXTSTEP/Apple uses gcc for everything, so building fat binaries is
just a matter of figuring out the gcc options.

A fat binary only solves the executable problem. The externals are just as much a headache to deal with as the Pd app - maybe more.

The catch with Rosetta is that you cannot load a PPC lib into an Intel application or vice versa. This is going to become slightly tricky to make sure people get the proper OSX externals that match their CPU type.

I don't think fat dylibs exist -it would be a useful thing to have though.