On May 28, 2006, at 1:07 AM, chris clepper wrote:

On 5/27/06, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans@eds.org> wrote:

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.

If its just a matter of giving some flags to gcc, which I think it is, then it would be _much_ easier to add those flags to the relevant makefiles than to deal with a new file extension.

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.

I think fat dylibs do exist (from a Slashdot thread):

OS X 10.4 uses fat binaries. For example, Apple recently botched a security update by failing to ship a fat binary for the BSD layer. This is what it's supposed to look like:

$ file /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib

/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures

/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (for architecture ppc): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library ppc

/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library ppc64

Apple's GCC has built-in support for fat binaries:

$ gcc -o hello hello.m -arch ppc -arch ppc64

hello: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures

hello (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc

hello (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64

If I had the right SDK installed, I could have added -arch i386. Building fat binaries with GCC and ICC will probably require the use of lipo(1).

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