I was quietly working at the Mac port for Open Object Rexx and the related BSF4Rexx, when Apple dropped the bombshell of doing a "switch" for themselves, this time to Intel CPU hardware. They must know something we don't know, because switching your 64 bit OS to a 32 bit Pentium 4 (quad 3.6Ghz) does not really make any sense. Dvorak predicted the Itanium, but it turns out to be ordinary x86; we have to forego The Cell, which is a pity, or switch ourselves to Linux, which probably will run soon on it. I am glad my own stuff is all Java, it only muddles the picture a bit for the C++ ports, which are a headache anyway.
XCode 2.1 came with a new gcc 4.0, that has new compiler errors in previously compiling code; such is the price of progress. Another day, another ABI. I am still looking for a good porting guide from Linux to MacOSX, one that explains that thread_t is a structure in BSD and not a pointer, and why my files do not open when the code is compiled with Tiger, while they work when compiled in Panther. With some bad luck the Intel situation multipies these kind of problems. The advantage is that I *do* know some x86 assembly, while PPC always was a black hole of a myriad of addressing modes and load/store interleaves.
Boy, I am glad my programs are Java. And Rexx.
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