November 16, 2005 10:47 PM

Education day - universal binaries

I spent a lot of time today to get some knowledge about universal binaries, a concept from Apple, that helps them to keep one single binary able to run on PowerPC based Macintosh computers and also on their new Intel based machines.

Thinking about it deeper. Interesting problems to solve ;-) How would you solve the problem defined as "Prepare ABI interface for two different architectures". Where different means: different instruction sets and instructions aligning, endianity, argument passing on stack or in registers, many and few registers, different results of divide-by-zero etc.

Funny citation from Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, 2nd edition (taken out of context):

Here are the most typical behavior problems you'll observe when your application runs natively on an Intel-based Macintosh computer: 1. The application crashes. -----

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Internet technologies