Mac transition to Intel processors: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:48, 14 June 2005

Revision as of 17:15, 14 June 2005

Line 65:

===Existing applications===

Ironically, because of the NeXTStep and FreeBSD cross-platform heritage it is likely that [[Application software|application]]-related disruption will be minimal. The evolution depends somewhat on the as-yet unresolved question of whether the transition is to Intel, or to a dual-platform strategy that includes Intel.

Firstly, Java applications that don't rely on [[JNI]], [[Dashboard (software)|Dashboard]] [[Widgets]], and [[Scripting programming language|scripts]] that execute inside an [[Interpreter (computing)|interpreter]] all work immediately on both processors and are immune from changes. OS X applications that can't be migrated run inside a PowerPC [[Binary translation|dynamic translator]] on Intel called "[[Rosetta (software)|Rosetta]]." This has limitations, most particularly in that it can't run [[AltiVec]] code, but most applications that use AltiVec fall back to a [[PowerPC G3|G3]] instruction set when AltiVec is not found and will still run in that configuration under Rosetta. Rosetta itself is broadly a better solution than [[Classic (Mac OS X)|Classic]] was for OS 9, as it doesn't require a whole OS to be loaded as a sub-system before the application can work and translations are [[cache]]d for maximum performance on the second and thereafter executions.