[Mono-dev] OS X Intel support

[kangaroo]

Jon/Joachim,

   Comments inline.

On 5-Jan-06, at 5:57 PM, Jonathan Pryor wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 19:40 +0100, Joachim Ante wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Are there any plans to support universal binary soon?
>>
>> Apple is pushing us quite a bit to port Unity to universal binary.
>>
>> This is especially important since the jit code does not get  
>> emulated by the
>> PPC emulator.
>
> IIRC (summarizing many different IRC sessions...)
>
> Mono has been ported to Intel Mac, in that the JIT will properly  
> execute
> under Mac OS X on an Intel box.
>

Partly right; the JIT executes properly.  The GC does not work; and  
SVN has bitrotted for building --with-gc=none.  This bitrot should be  
trivial to fix.

> As such you could install mono on an x86 mac with little trouble.
>

Assuming you dont need the GC yes.

> Universal "FAT" Binaries, in which both the PPC code and x86 code  
> are in
> the same binary, is a different kettle of fish.  The problem is  
> autoconf
> -- autoconf records the platform you're compiling for and generates  
> code
> for that platform.
>
> So for a FAT binary, you'd need to do a autoconf-driven cross-compile,
> build all of mono *twice* (PPC & x86), and then merge the resulting
> binaries into a single FAT binary.
>
> All this is possible, but non-trivial, and there is no timeframe that
> I've heard of for completing this work.
>

Bang on in that regard.

Not to mention gettext/glib/pkgconfig will all need to be "FAT"ed as  
well.

-geoff

PS.  Joachim; contact me and get me access to one of the boxes and I  
can look at getting the gc ported.