Re: Mike and Ward, what next?

ward mcfarland wrote:
> Jobs makes it sound like he has a smooth transition all mapped out, but
> this is a much bigger change than 68k->PPC.
>
> Jobs generously offers to sell mid and upper tier developers a 4.6 GHz
> P4 Mac for $995 (plus $500 for Select member****p).  So we need yet
> another machine on hand for developing and testing.

At the very least, the transition is intended to be over a 2 year
period.  So until about, say, June '06, Intel Macs would be in the
minority.  Unless a software item needs wide distribution,
incompatibilities should be somewhat manageable until then.  Hopefully.


> ... maybe we should go back to a tokenized model with the token
> displatching engine written as a Universal Binary and just abandon
> including an assembler or attempting to do non-trivial optimizing...
>

You would only have to put up with it until the transition was
complete; then you could go ahead and work with the processor-dependant
code.  I wonder if there's an op****tunity here to take a cue from the
Java VM or TCL interpreter.  Create a VM (written in C or ObjC) with
the core wordset, but extensible by shared libraries.  A text or
bytecode stream could be fed to it much the same way as Java, creating
a ****table base system to customize for a given platform.  I don't know
how you would be able to create turnkey apps or shared libraries with
it though.

Erik