Re: Ada on the Mac (was: AppletMagic stuff)

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1996Oct8.191754.1@eisner>,
Larry Kilgallen <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> wrote:

>Perhaps that interest is largely for in-house use.  I cannot name
>a single commercial Macintosh product which is PPC-only.  I am sure
>there are some, but the fact that I cannot name one indicates to me
>that they are not plentiful.

Try Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0. PPC only.

>Whether one can offer a PPC-only product to customers at some point
>in time depends strongly on the nature of the product.  A special-purpose
>item of interest only to "power users" might make it, but for any
>case where one looks to bulk purchases for multiple users, one must
>take care of the 68K machines which were handed down the food chain
>to the least favored users.

I agree.

>As Jim Hopper has pointed out, this has nothing to do with the choice
>of development environment.  Most 68K commercial products are probably
>built on PPC.

I can;t imagine serious developers not using up-to-the-minute machines
as development platforms. 

>(For those who might not be aware, the way most of the Macintosh
>products work is to ship both 68K and PPC code bundled into the
>same box and sometimes into the same file.)

Yes, this is what is called a "fat binary".

We're starting to beat a dead horse here, Larry. We're in violent
agreement that the 68k ought to be supported. My guess is that we
will eventually see a GNAT-Mac that's hosted under MachTen/PPC,
with code generators for both platforms.

What is holding it back is that the _current_ 68k support from Tenon
does not permit linking standalone apps. We've said several times here 
that Tenon is moving out in the direction of seeing MachTen as a _Mac_
development system, not just as a UN*X that happens to run on a Mac.
Indeed, the GNAT-Mac project has helped them understand the potential.

But they cannot do everything at once, so they understandably focused
on the PPC side first.

>Larry Kilgallen

Mike Feldman