x86 transition?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Here's a question that's been bugging me for a few weeks now. I remember Adobe after Steve Jobs announcement on the Intel transition saying that rewriting the code won't be such an easy task. The question is this. WHY? Why can't they use the pc side of the code? We're talking about the same processor technology here. In my eyes the only thing that they would have to change is the calls that the program makes to the os, the installer and stuff like that. But the core of the program is already there. In a language that an x86 processor can understand. I'm obviously missing lots of stuff due to my lack of knowledge on this subject so could someone please enlighten me?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by dimitris

    In my eyes the only thing that they would have to change is the calls that the program makes to the os, the installer and stuff like that. But the core of the program is already there. In a language that an x86 processor can understand.



    Those calls "to the OS" are what make up the bulk of most programs up. Switching from one OS to another is actually waaaay more work than switching chip architectures.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    O.k let's talk in simple terms here. For example if photoshop is 60% "what makes photoshop-photoshop" code and 40% "calls to the system" code then why is it taking so long? If our assumption that no recoding of the main program is required, then they already have 60% of the program ready. Again this is a lame example but if someone can't give me a good explanation I won't be able to get my head around this and I'll keep posting these humiliating for myself posts ... So please somebody stop me
  • Reply 3 of 3
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    It isn't "taking so long" really. That's just how long it takes when you're dealing with millions of lines of code.



    Keep in mind that debugging represents the bulk of the work in many development efforts. Writing code is easy. Making everything work together without bugs... that's what takes forever.
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