I notice that the FAT MacOS X binaries being built at the moment are all 4 way fat.
When a fat executable is launched, it will run as 64 bit, on a Mac with G5 or Core2Duo processors. There is no way of overriding this behaviour. On a Core2Duo machine this is good because the x86_64 ISA is a considerable improvement on the old i386 one, and all applications will generally run faster on this architecture in 64 bit. However, on the G5 the ISAs are the same for both 32 and 64 bit, only the pointer size changes. So that 64 bit actually runs more slowly. The only use for ppc64 is for programs that need very large memory spaces on G5 machines with at least 3GB of DRAM. I expect the sort of power users who run such code and can afford large amounts of DRAM have upgraded to a Mac Pro already. In short, I can see very little demand for ppc64 and including it just reduces performance for those running G5 Macs. Hence my suggestion to make Universal Binaries 3 way fat i386, x86_64 and ppc. Just a thought Bill _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
