Re: Snow Leopard: A 64-bit Observation

"Snit" <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:C5339E8B.DDE19%usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> stated in post
OJudnWrhSbuZpZPUnZ2dnUVZ_ovinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on 11/2/08 4:30 PM:
Aqua apps are scheduled via the Unixy goodness... and all that stuff.

They are scheduled by Mach.

I admit to not knowing how Mach is different from other Unix (or Unix like)
kernels. I recall it has something to do with how it passes info from one
process to another... I think. I guess if I cared enough I could Google it.

If you don't care enough, I won't burden you.

But don't let the "Unix" sloganeering fool you. OS X is essentially the same beast it was before it got certification, and it's not all that Unix like for those who aren't using its compatibility features.

For that, you may be thankful. :D

[snip]
Oh, OS X's memory management has always seems so-so to me... magical pixie
dust or not.

Memory management?

I have 4 GB of memory. Should be fine, even when I am running Windows in
virtualization. And it is... until my *inactive* memory gets real full...
then there is a definite slow down, at least with some things. It should be
trivial to empty that memory as needed, right? Seems OS X struggles with
that, at least in some cases.

Pages can go onto the inactive list without being first written to disk; so it might need to write them to disk before reclaiming that RAM.

[snip]
That's what we call a "Cocoa application"; it's quite typical for them to have
to turn to Carbon here and there.

Yes, the distinction is not that clear which is what.

It's pretty clear the Objective-C part is what Apple definitely supports. But there's an unfortunate fuzziness about which C APIs are effectively deprecated.

[snip- list of bundled 64-bit executables in Leopard]
That list really spoke for itself.

What about third party apps?

You got the full list of the ones on my system, at least as far as I know.

This seems to suggest that you own no 64-bit applications; it speaks to the rarity of the beasts on the Mac.

Windows Vista 64-bit does, in fact, come with a 64-bit version of "Chess
Titans". So there. :D

Yeah, but on 32 bit Windows each bit has to watch *two* squares! How
pathetic! :)

I think you may not have grasped the true inner essence of the 64-bit nature, exactly.

Or maybe you have, and our bits are spying on us. :/

[snip]
I'm afraid this will no longer fly. The figure MS has released demonstrate
that 64-bit Windows *is* a 'general version'; shipping to consumers off the
shelf, right now, in quantity.

This disparity is what leads me to say that Windows is ahead in the
64-bit transition- and it leads Apple-fans to say that 64-bit support isn't
much good anyway. :D

With OS X you can get 64 bit apps without needing to get a special or
different version of the OS.

Can you? I know that *in theory* you can, but in practice such apps are vanishingly rare.

Certainly there are apps Mac users would like to get in 64-bit, but can't. Photoshop is the classic example.

And it may be a long-term one, too. I have been looking for Adobe's statement of their plans for 64-bit Cocoa Photoshop, and it does not appear to actually exist.

The only statement I've found is on John Nack's *blog*, and it is much hedged. He says "We will get there, but not in CS4"; he also says "Our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5, but we'll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process." This falls well short of a commitment or promise to ship 64-bit Photoshop CS5. It's not even an actual official statement by Adobe.

So, I may yet turn out to be right: they may not port to Cocoa. I can only hope. :D

But it appears to me that Adobe has been the victim of the same process that happens to Microsoft every ten minutes: their issue a hedged, careful, and unofficial statement that says nothing- and it becomes a hard-and-fast promise in the minds of many.

And your drivers still work. This is not
ideal, as the drivers are 32 bit, but it does make things easier for the
user.

The 32-bit drivers still work because it's not a real 64-bit OS yet. Apple is going to fix this, I think.

Then again, how many users need 64 bit programs (except for needing
to look at all the squares!)

One may ask how many users need *32* bit programs; you can do a lot with 16-bit, after all. But memory is cheap, so why *not* use it?

You know, provided your hardware and OS support all that memory properly.

For Photoshop it clearly can, at least in some situations, matter.

Well, that's not an admission I expected to get from you, I may say. :/

Especially with Photoshop working more and more with video and 3D objects it
may matter a lot more than I had anticipated. And even though Adobe has
been kind, publicly, to Apple, I still think Apple made a mistake in
changing their story on 64 bit Carbon.

I think that, whatever you think of Apple's technology choices, leading its developers on with stories of 64-bit Carbon was a clear-cut error.

There might be good reason for this
- the nature of tech is sometimes you get into a complex project and you
realize there are alternative ways which are better in the long run, but
that does not mean it was not a mistake.

It is possible they encountered some fundamental problem that prevented 64-bit Carbon from being completed, but it's unlikely- and I think they'd have given an excuse if they had one. The on-again off-again nature of 64-bit Carbon suggests politics to me.


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