Allan wrote:
> I have never heard
> anyone in my years of experience ever say the gcc compiler was "poor". 

Then you clearly have insufficient experience. Try Google if you seriously
want specifics on the many gcc performance problems. The gcc mailing lists
are a good resource, too.

> to the "rushed and incomplete port" of OS X to the intel architecture:
> where have you been hiding the last few years?  OS X has been running on
> intel processors since version 10.0. 

This claim is complete nonsense: Mac OS X has not been available on x86
processors until last year (in beta versions on a single system
configuration). I suppose you are confusing Mac OS X with the Mach kernel,
which indeed has been running on x86 processors for decades now.

> Apple took their time to release the intel version for obvious marketing
> reasons.

To understand the difference between a rushed introduction and a planned
introduction, compare the current mess with the 68K to PowerPC transition:
At least by the time the first PowerPC systems shipped there was a working
and fully supported debugger available that would work on emulated and
native code. Further, native and emulated code could even be linked together
transparently by design. Neither is the case for the PowerPC to x86
transition. In fact, Apple quickly abandoned all attempts of even providing
a debugger for emulated code (and quite obviously to date there is none),
and to further rush the "transition", Apple also elected to provide
absolutely no way for native and emulated code to work together by any
means, let alone linking.

Of course, maybe a timeline is easier to understand for you: There were over
three years between the announcement of the transition to the initial
switch, while this time around everything from the announcement to
abandoning all previous hardware took just barely one year. Compare that to
similar transitions at HP/Compaq/DEC, Sun, SGI, or IBM. They all
concurrently develop their systems on different architectures for many
years, and most certainly none of them over dropped one processor
architecture for another literary from one day to the next, by public
announcement to developers and users at the same time. Not even SGI, which
certainly had every financial motivation to do so!

> As for the "broken emulator", Apple clearly states that well written and
> well behaved applications will run with no problem under Rosetta.

I have yet to read such a statement: I suppose you simply misinterpreted
some statement by Apple, but effectively it does not matter as fact is
Rosetta does not work with POV-Ray, yet POV-Ray runs on every real
PowerPC-based Mac, so how you can argue anything but that Rosetta is broken
is beyond logic :-(

Fact is that POV-Ray is an industry-standard benchmark application. If
Rosetta cannot handle it, it actually is either sign of incompetence on part
of the Rosetta developers or managers deciding to ignore Rosetta's problems.
My personal suspicion is that it is a management problem (aka Apple-"god"
Jobs), which also explains the rushed transition in general.

> I also have Silo v1.42 running with no problems.  These are hardly trivial
> applications.  What kind of platform dependent tricks do you employ in
> POV-ray that b) breaks Rosetta?

I have no idea what "tricks" you think there exist for such purpose. Either
you know very little about programming, or you are asserting POV-Ray 3.6 -
released years before Rosetta was even developed - was intentionally
designed to not work with Rosetta. As such, I can only conclude you either
don't know what you are talking about or you need serious help from a
psychiatrist...

> a) makes it difficult to port

I have already answered this question in a reply to you on September 25th.

	Thorsten

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