Re: fragile ABI and PPC64
Re: fragile ABI and PPC64
- Subject: Re: fragile ABI and PPC64
- From: Nick Zitzmann <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:01:24 -0600
On Aug 19, 2012, at 11:14 PM, Dale Miller <email@hidden> wrote:
> while I'm at it, I have noticed several times mention being made of "bugginess" in the PPC64 environment. I'm aware that converting a PPC application to 64-bit might not improve performance because of the increased size of pointers, etc, but this is really because the PPC (G5) does not provide additional registers (already has 32 GPR's) and uses registers for most parameter passing instead of having to put them in memory on the stack even in 32-bit mode. So can anyone let me know specific problems so I can avoid them? I have a personal use for a 64-bit application that I've been thinking of writing and I don't want to run it on my 10.6 Macbook.
I don't remember all of the specifics, but I do remember that Leopard's 64-bit GUI frameworks had a bunch of interesting bugs in them that did not exist in the 32-bit frameworks, and they weren't fixed until Snow Leopard launched. The biggest one I remember is, if a user plugs in a computer pad, turns on Ink, and runs a 64-bit app in Leopard, the app will crash. I also recall that WebKit was unstable, and QTKit even lost its PPC64 support in a security update. It was for reasons like these that we decided to drop PPC64 support in our GUI apps, and require Snow Leopard for the X86-64 builds.
I never noticed any problems in the 64-bit non-GUI frameworks, e.g. Foundation or CoreFoundation.
Nick Zitzmann
<http://www.chronosnet.com/>
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