On 4/02/2011, at 2:14 PM, wren ng thornton wrote:
On 2/3/11 10:48 AM, Max Cantor wrote:
Does it make sense to relegate OSX x86_64 to community status while the 32-bit version is considered a supported platform?
I'm not sure I can make sense of what you mean here. Given the preamble, I'd guess you're asking whether we should make x86_64 the targeted architecture for OSX support, and reclassify 32-bit OSX to unsupported or "hopefully it still works" status. (But in that case, it's the 32-bit which would be "relegated" to unsupported status while x86_64 is "considered a supported platform"...)
Can you clarify the question?
Here's something that happened to me: GHC was installed on this machine and worked fine, but when the operating system was upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6.something, GHC broke, with messages along the lines of "you can't use 32-bit absolute addresses in 64-bit code". The operating system is perfectly happy running both 32-bit and 64-code code and all the tool chain is happy working with either, but the *default* changed from "say nothing get 32-bit" to "say nothing get 64-bit". I'm guessing that GHC gives the compiler some C code and some (32-bit) object files or libraries. So now I have *different* GHC setups on the 10.6.5 desktop machine and the 10.5.8 laptop... Since both machines have only 4GB of physical memory, 32-bit would be fine, except for all those lovely extra registers in x86_64 mode. I think the original poster is saying that the targeted architecture for OS X support should be the architecture that OS X assumes by default, and these days that's x86_64. It would be really nice for x86 mode to be well supported for a while longer.