[sldev] 64bit of sl? (Mac)

[Aimee Trescothick]

Unfortunately creating a 64-bit Mac version of the viewer is not quite as simple as just recompiling it into a 32/64-bit universal binary. Right now the viewer relies on some of the Carbon APIs which are only available in 32-bit, to produce a 64-bit version will mean transitioning to using the Cocoa equivalents, mixing in a greater amount of Objective-C than the viewer contains now to do so. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but still a fair amount of work. I would imagine it is more than is reasonably justifiable from a cost vs immediate benefit point of view within the Lab, compared with other priorities right now. It is probably harder to justify the development effort than 64-bit Windows and Linux versions, as we don't tend to have the same 32/64-bit compatibility headaches on OS X.

Having said that (which I know probably all makes me sound a bit of a wet blanket) it will still need to happen at some point, and open source development and Snowglobe are an excellent solution and home for the project to make it happen sooner. I have already started the ground work by committing a few fixes to make Snowglobe compile cleanly against all of the 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 SDKs (although there is still one remaining issue SNOW-223 which requires patching APR to make it play nicely with the 10.6 SDK, as well as 10.4 and 10.5).

Even with the use of universal binaries to support both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, it can be quite a headache to maintain compatibility across all of 10.4.11 (the current official minimum requirement)), 10.5 and 10.6 especially if (when!) we wish to start using some of the newer features of Leopard and Snow Leopard, which is probably where the greater benefits lie, probably much more so than 'simply' moving to 64-bit. It would interesting to know how many people are actually still using the viewer on 10.4, especially Snowglobe (don't worry people, I'm not suggesting you're insignificant and should be immediately abandoned :)

Aimee.
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