"To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to today?s servers, Snow Leopard Server uses 64-bit kernel technology to support breakthrough amounts of RAM ? up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times what is possible today."
64 bit Kernel is only mentioned in Snow Leopard Server page but the theorical limit of up to 16TB is the same on both Snow Leopard pages.
As far as I know the reason that makes Leopard compatible with both 64bit and 32bit processors in the same package is its 32bit kernel. When it becomes 64bit it may not be possible to make a universal release anymore, so apple may release different versions of Snow Leopard or just drop 32bit support. If they drop CoreDuo support it will be much easier for them to drop PPC G5 support too.
So, why not mention it clearly on June 2008? I think more people will accept such decisions on 2009 rather than 2008!
It is not some code present because of laziness, the whole package is universal and you can take your Leopard installed on a PowerPC mac to any intel mac and boot just fine and start using it!(I have personally tested this with iMac G5 and iMac Core2Duo)
You cant take your intel installed Leopard to PowerPC macs because they cant boot from GPT/GUID disks.
Sorry for my bad English!
You're just making guesses, aren't you?
Think about you said. A 32 bit kernel supports a 64 bit OS, but a 64 bit kernel doesn't support 32 bit programs of processors.
it's a joke to call OS X the "most advanced OS" when it has such total garbage for a file system.
Complete and utter hogwash.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FineWine
Even Linus Torvalds who is a well-known champion of OS X
Er, no, well-known champion of Linux.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FineWine
and the mac platform, admitted that HFS was total sh|t ("complete and utter crap," and even "scary."):
Indeed, Linus accused HFS+ of being "complete and utter crap" and "scary", without providing any supporting evidence whatsoever. There was a thread discussing it here and the general consensus was that he was talking out of his backside.
Why do you think that HFS+ is so awful? Give me the juicy technical lowdown, not some self-serving quote from the purveyor of a competing OS.
Honestly, HFS+, far from being shit, is one of the best file systems out there. It supports journaling, long file names (with only one non-allowed character), case sensitivity (although third-party programs tend not to like that), meta-data, multiple data forks for files, has very high limits on number of files in a directory (2.1 billion), file size (8 EiB), partition size (8 EiB), and has low susceptibility to fragmentation.
Yes, ZFS is a more advanced file system, but that brings with it some drawbacks such as higher CPU overhead. Just because there are other more advanced file systems (and there's very few that are more advanced than HFS+), that doesn't make HFS+ shit.
Think about you said. A 32 bit kernel supports a 64 bit OS, but a 64 bit kernel doesn't support 32 bit programs of processors.
I did not say that.
Both PPC64(G5) and x64(like Core2 and Xeon) processors support 32bit Operating Systems so Mach can be 32bit and still run on them, while CoreDuo(x86) and PPC32(G4) cant run 64 bit kernels so we can have both 32bit and 64bit mach for G5 and x64 and 32 bit mach for Core and G4.
We have a 32bit mach in Leopard with 2 architectures:
I'm just guessing that it may not be possible to have 64bit and 32 bit mach on the same package.
Even if it is possible to have 32bit and 64bit mach at the same time it should have 4 architectures: PPC, i386, PPC64 , x86_64! It wont reduce Snow Leopard footprint for sure
Edit: by saying "it may not be possible to have 64bit and 32 bit mach on the same package" I dont mean Fat binaries cant handle that(Fat binary supports this), I mean it may not be possible to have a single Snow Leopard release that contains both 64 bit and 32 bit kernels.
So if it is just performance and stability, what is there to preview?
I imagine that Betrand provided a bit more detail on exactly how the increased performance and lower footprint would be achieved. It'll be a while before we get to find out, because that session was delivered under NDA.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac-sochist
Maybe I'm missing something, but the way I read the announcement, Snow Leopard is of no relevance to current Mac owners, unless you have a 4- or 8-core Mac Pro with some extreme high-end video card with more processing power than an iMac.
Yes, you are missing something. Whilst multi-core systems will probably receive the biggest boost, the performance optimisations are unlikely to be focussed solely on multi-core. From the limited information provided, it seems that they will be doing some serious work to the kernel, and that is no small undertaking. The improvements are likely to cover other areas such as disk I/O, and virtual memory.
You've schooled me on the 32-bit portion, but we can still deduce that PPC is beign removed from the following paragraph...
Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.
There are other ways to reduce code but removing PPC support is the simplest answer.
It'll reduce it on disk, which isn't really important as you'd gain back maybe a few GB of hard disk and nobody really cares about that. Where it's important they reduce the footprint is in RAM and CPU cycles and since the PPC code isn't loaded on an Intel CPU, that's not an issue either.
I think/hope they mean they're reducing how much RAM some of the OS's frameworks consume, which have been getting larger over time. Just kicking the old Quicktime code into touch (no pun intended) would be a great start.
QUOTE=archer75;1262231]It boggles my mind that they are releasing Snow Leopard which is primarily a maintenance release.
Bug fixes, security and stability should always be patched in and seeing as how we are only on 10.5.3 we have alot of numbers left to go.
I wonder if they are simply running out of ideas to fit in an OS. I think Tiger was their shining achievement and they didn't deliver near as much with Leopard.
Or perhaps there is more than they are telling us. Rumors of dropping PPC support. They do mention improving compatibility with modern hardware and I did read an article just today that suggested Apple may indeed be moving to opening up OSX to run on PC's. Whatever the case I think something is certainly up.[/QUOTE]
You have a point. Perhaps no ideas are forthcoming. Perhaps ideas can't always flow constantly to the grey matter at Apple labs but there are a number (maybe a lot) of things they could fix/re-instate.
One of those that was a feature of Spotlight/Finder searches/Smart folders: the Search view. This was the view that grouped file types by kind, separated by blue separators and fitted out with some tools (Play slide show, top five, less etc...). This was the most attractive aspect of the Spotlight paradigm for me. It meant that a Smart folder with a project for 20th Century fine art would always have images of paintings by Picasso, Dali and Matisse in one place and ready to be presented in a slideshow. Now I am guessing that Apple dropped the search view because it was the default view in searches and may have been a hog on resources causing a general sluggishness in Spotlight. All very well and fine but for me the priority was functionality, not speed. Apple could just have the Search View, not as default, but as a view that one could use to tidy up the search and perhaps they may do this in 10.6 to clean up the mess that Spotlight can be.
The other feature Apple could polish are the stacks. In an early developer build of Leopard one could navigate through folders to different directories, much like hierarchical folders in the Dock. The stack HUD would change to reflect the contents of the folder. This was dropped in the final release of Leopard. For me when I saw a leaked video of this in action I was impressed. It was a killer. It reminded me of those pop-up folders in Mac OS 9. I was disappointed when they did not transpire. For me stacks are visual, a much quicker way to work if you know what you are looking for and where it is located.
One last thing. I hope that the romours are incorrect; that carbon may disappear. I use Apple Works for a certain task. It does the job well where other apps are more cumbersome.
First I'd like to mention that Windows 7 isn't even expected to ship until Late 2009/Early 2010, which Snow Leopard will more than readily beat.
Things I'd like to see in Snow Leopard:
? "Grand Central" - sounds like an expansion of NSOperation/NSOperationQueue
? OpenCL (BTW, I cannot find anything about this online. Is this still internal LOOKING to be an Open Standard???)
? ZFS - Please...ZFS snapshots = Snappy Time Machine. And while you have those 4 cores, might as well do on the fly disk compression and save some drive space.
Snow Leopard is the enterprise targeted OS X.
? Pull the Exchange support from iPhone into the rest of the OS
? mobileme for enterprises (on Server)
I'm sure there's other things that just aren't coming to mind.
Add a complete overhaul of OpenGL and the video card drivers to the list.
Apple is cleaning up the OS. Apple is taking a step back and reviewing/rewriting code. Slashing code out. It's a VERY wise choice and it's one that very little software company (I'm looking at you Adobe) actually undertakes.
As much as some people would like to see an OS X update with tons of feature, it's absolutely essential that Apple takes this 'feature' break to concentrate on optimization/stability/clean up or risk ending up with bloat software like XP/Vista/Photoshop/Office.
People that aren't happy with the thought of this can skip 10.6 altogether and there will be no harm done. Leopard is excellent for what it is and will be good enough for the next 3-4 years.
One last thing. I hope that the romours are incorrect; that carbon may disappear. I use Apple Works for a certain task. It does the job well where other apps are more cumbersome.
I don't think carbon will disappear, but I think it will be discontinued on the programming side.
One thing. Forgive me if I am incorrect (currently on vacation and head generally not in Mac things) but did Apple state that Snow Leopard would be released as retail some time next year? Did I hear that Snow Leopard would only be available on new hardware and that it has not been formally named as 10.6? Would this make sense? It would be like there not being a retail version of Tiger for Intel Macs. Hence, the low profile announcement of Snow Leopard. There may well be a Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.7 named Lion or Tabby or may or may not run on PPC? Who Knows?
did Apple state that Snow Leopard would be released as retail some time next year?
No, they didn't state explicitly that it would be released to retail, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be. There will be plenty of machines out there right now that will benefit from the improvements. I expect it to be available for $50 or less.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iGrouch
Did I hear that Snow Leopard would only be available on new hardware
I don't think you did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iGrouch
and that it has not been formally named as 10.6?
Indeed it has not been formerly named as 10.6 yet. But they have referred to it as the "next major version", so one would have to assume that its full name will be "Mac OS X version 10.6 (Snow Leopard)"
I for one am very happy to see a major software company focussing on performance rather than piling on more and more useless crap, aka "features".
Now that it looks like the clock-speed race is over in CPU land, and it's switched to a number-of-cores race, research and development into how best to leverage that parallel processing is vital.
Anyone know where to go to get more juicy info on Snow Leopard? How long was the presentation? Hopefully ars will have something at some point.
As a code developer, I'd welcome a machine that doesn't hang-up as frequently as 10.5 does, especially 10.5.3. Apple should pay attention to fixing what they've got and not adding more crap that we don't need, won't work, and we possibly can't afford, Just make it work.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV.
This is because 90% of people will gladly accept mediocrity as the standard.
1. Hopefully not. I hope they don't waste resources to support a computer nobody should have anymore.
That's an idiotic statement. The quad G5s are as fast as most of the models apple is selling now, and they're not that old. Or do you think Apple customers should just blindly buy new machines even if the old ones are more than fast enough just to line Stevie's pockets?
So was there any mention at the event about intel/PPC? If not, is there any word of anyone attending the event asking Apple folks about that?
I'm happy if they stop adding MORE stuff... to be honest, I already feel 10.5 has a lot (too much) crap. A lot is fluff and I struggle every damn time I have to explain to a switcher all there is to use.. they go into overload.
Even for myself, I use maybe half the goodies that OS X offers and I've been usin' Macs since 84!
It'd be nice if they would finally, once and for all, fix certain really basic stupid things like easier mixed environment file sharing (LAN between Mac/Win/Nix), and maybe after 15 years actualy have the damn green 'expand' button do something USEFUL. I hate warning new users "DONT TOUCH THE GREEN BUTTON!" Every damn app does very very wonky shit when you touch it...
16 terrabytes sounds like a lot, but since 10.5 already supports 4 TB of physical memory, is it really that big a deal? 10.7 or 10.8 will probably be out before Apple ships a machine that can hold more ram than 10.5 can access. Same with multicore - it would sound much more impressive if Apple didn't already claim that 10.5 was a multicore powerhouse. They have already promised things like this and failed to deliver, why should we have any faith in these claimed improvements until they actually ship it and show the benefits with benchmarks?
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
PPC and Intel 32-bit are gone.
"Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos."
That's a pretty big assumption to make from such a vague statement. For all we know they're just going to switch to a smart installer that leaves out the unnecessary code, or at least gives that as an option.
Quote:
Originally Posted by melgross
That's stretching it.
Why would Intel machines have PPC code in the first place? The installer installs PPC code into PPC machines, and Intel code into Intel machines.
Are you thinking that it installs both into both?
It certainly doesn't!
Are you sure about that? In the case of APPS, including apple ones, they include the PPC code in many cases. Are you sure they don't do the same with OS code?
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
I'm not seeing why they would have to tell developers they are dropping PPC. If the SDK compiles for these apps automatically, could they not just recompile the binaries to exclude PPC?
Because there are fixes and optimizations specific to PPC. Devs would be pissed if they put effort into a version that's not supported. Apple has to tell devs that soon if that's what they have planned.
I for one am looking forward to Snow Leopard, whether it's a paid update or not. I don't think it's simply about optimizing the code (though the Safari team has shown that they can squeeze a lot of performance improvements out of doing that - Squirrelfish is much faster than the current Javascript implementation in Safari), I think it's about a whole new way of converting the code to binaries.
Apple is the biggest developer of LLVM, after it hired Chris Lattner who developed it at the University of Illinois. LLVM (http://llvm.org/) is really aimed at optimizing code as part of the compilation strategy, and is partly what Apple will use to replace gcc. gcc, while it has been fabulous, is showing its age, in that it has a lot of difficult code to maintain and improve, and it's easy to break things. Apple realized that if they rely on gcc as a compiler, there's not going to be revolutionary improvements in the produced code. So instead, they decided they needed a new back end for compilation, and that's llvm. They have also decided they need a new front end, which is the actual code parsing itself. Currently llvm relies on gcc for this, but Apple is developing a new compiler, called clang (http://clang.llvm.org/) which is already showing useful performance gains, though is early in its development. Looking at the sessions at WWDC, one of them on compiler technologies says:
"Xcode 3.1 introduces two new compilers for Mac OS X: GCC 4.2 and LLVM-GCC. Learn how the new security and performance improvements in GCC 4.2 can help you produce better applications. Understand the innovations in LLVM-GCC, and find out how you can use it in your own testing and development. Finally, get a preview of future compiler developments"
I suspect that Snow Leopard will be completely compiled by LLVM, though not sure whether they will have clang ready to act as the front end, so it may use gcc for that part. The result will end up being dramatically faster executables, even with no changes made to source code of the applications. However, given the APIs that they are developing for taking better advantage of the multiple cores and graphics chips, apps that take advantage of those (e.g. Quicktime X) will show even more dramatic performance gains. Another interesting thing about LLVM, is that you could ship code that is partway compiled, and then have the compilation finish on the target machine, meaning that it is optimized for a user's particular hardware (this is similar to what Gentoo Linux does, though you get the source in that case, rather than some intermediate compiled form). If it knows about your processor, and your graphics card, then there are certain additional optimizations that can be made at compile time, rather than having to figure out what code path to take at runtime.
While there may be no new "user visible features", as in a new app, or new UI, or new paradigm such as Expose, the amount of work that will have to go into developing Snow Leopard will be no less than the amount of effort that has gone into past releases. This is much more than a 10.5.x release - I'm expecting *some* applications to show more than 2x increases in performance. If you offered me a processor that was twice as fast for the cost of an OS update (who knows what or if it will cost, but it will certainly be no more than $129), I would buy it in an instant. I believe Snow Leopard will be just as good an investment.
Clang doesn't sound like it is something you would bet an operating system on. It hasn't been out there long enough. I don't think Apple is using gcc for the kernel.
From the clang page.
Quote:
Current Status
Clang is still in early development stages. If you are looking for source analysis or source-to-source transformation tools, clang is probably a great solution for you. If you want to use it as a drop in C compiler, it is not yet ready.
Clang currently has pretty good parsing and semantic analysis support for C and Objective-C right now, and bugs are usually quickly fixed once reported. C++ support is still very early, and we don't expect to have respectable C++ support for another 2 years or so.
Comments
Now that's interesting. Never tried it before. Are you sure?
If you don't believe me google "boot powerpc leopard on intel"
Here is the scary part:
"To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to today?s servers, Snow Leopard Server uses 64-bit kernel technology to support breakthrough amounts of RAM ? up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times what is possible today."
64 bit Kernel is only mentioned in Snow Leopard Server page but the theorical limit of up to 16TB is the same on both Snow Leopard pages.
As far as I know the reason that makes Leopard compatible with both 64bit and 32bit processors in the same package is its 32bit kernel. When it becomes 64bit it may not be possible to make a universal release anymore, so apple may release different versions of Snow Leopard or just drop 32bit support. If they drop CoreDuo support it will be much easier for them to drop PPC G5 support too.
So, why not mention it clearly on June 2008? I think more people will accept such decisions on 2009 rather than 2008!
It is not some code present because of laziness, the whole package is universal and you can take your Leopard installed on a PowerPC mac to any intel mac and boot just fine and start using it!(I have personally tested this with iMac G5 and iMac Core2Duo)
You cant take your intel installed Leopard to PowerPC macs because they cant boot from GPT/GUID disks.
Sorry for my bad English!
You're just making guesses, aren't you?
Think about you said. A 32 bit kernel supports a 64 bit OS, but a 64 bit kernel doesn't support 32 bit programs of processors.
Staying with HFS is seriously hobbling OS X
Nonsense.
it's a joke to call OS X the "most advanced OS" when it has such total garbage for a file system.
Complete and utter hogwash.
Even Linus Torvalds who is a well-known champion of OS X
Er, no, well-known champion of Linux.
and the mac platform, admitted that HFS was total sh|t ("complete and utter crap," and even "scary."):
Indeed, Linus accused HFS+ of being "complete and utter crap" and "scary", without providing any supporting evidence whatsoever. There was a thread discussing it here and the general consensus was that he was talking out of his backside.
Why do you think that HFS+ is so awful? Give me the juicy technical lowdown, not some self-serving quote from the purveyor of a competing OS.
Honestly, HFS+, far from being shit, is one of the best file systems out there. It supports journaling, long file names (with only one non-allowed character), case sensitivity (although third-party programs tend not to like that), meta-data, multiple data forks for files, has very high limits on number of files in a directory (2.1 billion), file size (8 EiB), partition size (8 EiB), and has low susceptibility to fragmentation.
Yes, ZFS is a more advanced file system, but that brings with it some drawbacks such as higher CPU overhead. Just because there are other more advanced file systems (and there's very few that are more advanced than HFS+), that doesn't make HFS+ shit.
You're just making guesses, aren't you?
Think about you said. A 32 bit kernel supports a 64 bit OS, but a 64 bit kernel doesn't support 32 bit programs of processors.
I did not say that.
Both PPC64(G5) and x64(like Core2 and Xeon) processors support 32bit Operating Systems so Mach can be 32bit and still run on them, while CoreDuo(x86) and PPC32(G4) cant run 64 bit kernels so we can have both 32bit and 64bit mach for G5 and x64 and 32 bit mach for Core and G4.
We have a 32bit mach in Leopard with 2 architectures:
mach_kernel (for architecture i386)
mach_kernel (for architecture ppc)
I'm just guessing that it may not be possible to have 64bit and 32 bit mach on the same package.
Even if it is possible to have 32bit and 64bit mach at the same time it should have 4 architectures: PPC, i386, PPC64 , x86_64! It wont reduce Snow Leopard footprint for sure
Edit: by saying "it may not be possible to have 64bit and 32 bit mach on the same package" I dont mean Fat binaries cant handle that(Fat binary supports this), I mean it may not be possible to have a single Snow Leopard release that contains both 64 bit and 32 bit kernels.
So if it is just performance and stability, what is there to preview?
I imagine that Betrand provided a bit more detail on exactly how the increased performance and lower footprint would be achieved. It'll be a while before we get to find out, because that session was delivered under NDA.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the way I read the announcement, Snow Leopard is of no relevance to current Mac owners, unless you have a 4- or 8-core Mac Pro with some extreme high-end video card with more processing power than an iMac.
Yes, you are missing something. Whilst multi-core systems will probably receive the biggest boost, the performance optimisations are unlikely to be focussed solely on multi-core. From the limited information provided, it seems that they will be doing some serious work to the kernel, and that is no small undertaking. The improvements are likely to cover other areas such as disk I/O, and virtual memory.
That's stretching it.
Why would Intel machines have PPC code in the first place? The installer installs PPC code into PPC machines, and Intel code into Intel machines.
Are you thinking that it installs both into both?
It certainly doesn't!
It certainly does!
You've schooled me on the 32-bit portion, but we can still deduce that PPC is beign removed from the following paragraph...There are other ways to reduce code but removing PPC support is the simplest answer.
It'll reduce it on disk, which isn't really important as you'd gain back maybe a few GB of hard disk and nobody really cares about that. Where it's important they reduce the footprint is in RAM and CPU cycles and since the PPC code isn't loaded on an Intel CPU, that's not an issue either.
I think/hope they mean they're reducing how much RAM some of the OS's frameworks consume, which have been getting larger over time. Just kicking the old Quicktime code into touch (no pun intended) would be a great start.
Bug fixes, security and stability should always be patched in and seeing as how we are only on 10.5.3 we have alot of numbers left to go.
I wonder if they are simply running out of ideas to fit in an OS. I think Tiger was their shining achievement and they didn't deliver near as much with Leopard.
Or perhaps there is more than they are telling us. Rumors of dropping PPC support. They do mention improving compatibility with modern hardware and I did read an article just today that suggested Apple may indeed be moving to opening up OSX to run on PC's. Whatever the case I think something is certainly up.[/QUOTE]
You have a point. Perhaps no ideas are forthcoming. Perhaps ideas can't always flow constantly to the grey matter at Apple labs but there are a number (maybe a lot) of things they could fix/re-instate.
One of those that was a feature of Spotlight/Finder searches/Smart folders: the Search view. This was the view that grouped file types by kind, separated by blue separators and fitted out with some tools (Play slide show, top five, less etc...). This was the most attractive aspect of the Spotlight paradigm for me. It meant that a Smart folder with a project for 20th Century fine art would always have images of paintings by Picasso, Dali and Matisse in one place and ready to be presented in a slideshow. Now I am guessing that Apple dropped the search view because it was the default view in searches and may have been a hog on resources causing a general sluggishness in Spotlight. All very well and fine but for me the priority was functionality, not speed. Apple could just have the Search View, not as default, but as a view that one could use to tidy up the search and perhaps they may do this in 10.6 to clean up the mess that Spotlight can be.
The other feature Apple could polish are the stacks. In an early developer build of Leopard one could navigate through folders to different directories, much like hierarchical folders in the Dock. The stack HUD would change to reflect the contents of the folder. This was dropped in the final release of Leopard. For me when I saw a leaked video of this in action I was impressed. It was a killer. It reminded me of those pop-up folders in Mac OS 9. I was disappointed when they did not transpire. For me stacks are visual, a much quicker way to work if you know what you are looking for and where it is located.
One last thing. I hope that the romours are incorrect; that carbon may disappear. I use Apple Works for a certain task. It does the job well where other apps are more cumbersome.
First I'd like to mention that Windows 7 isn't even expected to ship until Late 2009/Early 2010, which Snow Leopard will more than readily beat.
Things I'd like to see in Snow Leopard:
? "Grand Central" - sounds like an expansion of NSOperation/NSOperationQueue
? OpenCL (BTW, I cannot find anything about this online. Is this still internal LOOKING to be an Open Standard???)
? ZFS - Please...ZFS snapshots = Snappy Time Machine. And while you have those 4 cores, might as well do on the fly disk compression and save some drive space.
Snow Leopard is the enterprise targeted OS X.
? Pull the Exchange support from iPhone into the rest of the OS
? mobileme for enterprises (on Server)
I'm sure there's other things that just aren't coming to mind.
Add a complete overhaul of OpenGL and the video card drivers to the list.
Apple is cleaning up the OS. Apple is taking a step back and reviewing/rewriting code. Slashing code out. It's a VERY wise choice and it's one that very little software company (I'm looking at you Adobe) actually undertakes.
As much as some people would like to see an OS X update with tons of feature, it's absolutely essential that Apple takes this 'feature' break to concentrate on optimization/stability/clean up or risk ending up with bloat software like XP/Vista/Photoshop/Office.
People that aren't happy with the thought of this can skip 10.6 altogether and there will be no harm done. Leopard is excellent for what it is and will be good enough for the next 3-4 years.
One last thing. I hope that the romours are incorrect; that carbon may disappear. I use Apple Works for a certain task. It does the job well where other apps are more cumbersome.
I don't think carbon will disappear, but I think it will be discontinued on the programming side.
did Apple state that Snow Leopard would be released as retail some time next year?
No, they didn't state explicitly that it would be released to retail, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be. There will be plenty of machines out there right now that will benefit from the improvements. I expect it to be available for $50 or less.
Did I hear that Snow Leopard would only be available on new hardware
I don't think you did.
and that it has not been formally named as 10.6?
Indeed it has not been formerly named as 10.6 yet. But they have referred to it as the "next major version", so one would have to assume that its full name will be "Mac OS X version 10.6 (Snow Leopard)"
I for one am very happy to see a major software company focussing on performance rather than piling on more and more useless crap, aka "features".
Now that it looks like the clock-speed race is over in CPU land, and it's switched to a number-of-cores race, research and development into how best to leverage that parallel processing is vital.
Anyone know where to go to get more juicy info on Snow Leopard? How long was the presentation? Hopefully ars will have something at some point.
As a code developer, I'd welcome a machine that doesn't hang-up as frequently as 10.5 does, especially 10.5.3. Apple should pay attention to fixing what they've got and not adding more crap that we don't need, won't work, and we possibly can't afford, Just make it work.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV.
This is because 90% of people will gladly accept mediocrity as the standard.
1. Hopefully not. I hope they don't waste resources to support a computer nobody should have anymore.
That's an idiotic statement. The quad G5s are as fast as most of the models apple is selling now, and they're not that old. Or do you think Apple customers should just blindly buy new machines even if the old ones are more than fast enough just to line Stevie's pockets?
So was there any mention at the event about intel/PPC? If not, is there any word of anyone attending the event asking Apple folks about that?
It could be the end of version 10.x
2010-2011 may herald the beginning of OS X 11.0
I'm happy if they stop adding MORE stuff... to be honest, I already feel 10.5 has a lot (too much) crap. A lot is fluff and I struggle every damn time I have to explain to a switcher all there is to use.. they go into overload.
Even for myself, I use maybe half the goodies that OS X offers and I've been usin' Macs since 84!
It'd be nice if they would finally, once and for all, fix certain really basic stupid things like easier mixed environment file sharing (LAN between Mac/Win/Nix), and maybe after 15 years actualy have the damn green 'expand' button do something USEFUL. I hate warning new users "DONT TOUCH THE GREEN BUTTON!" Every damn app does very very wonky shit when you touch it...
What's the green button?
PPC and Intel 32-bit are gone.
That's a pretty big assumption to make from such a vague statement. For all we know they're just going to switch to a smart installer that leaves out the unnecessary code, or at least gives that as an option.
That's stretching it.
Why would Intel machines have PPC code in the first place? The installer installs PPC code into PPC machines, and Intel code into Intel machines.
Are you thinking that it installs both into both?
It certainly doesn't!
Are you sure about that? In the case of APPS, including apple ones, they include the PPC code in many cases. Are you sure they don't do the same with OS code?
I'm not seeing why they would have to tell developers they are dropping PPC. If the SDK compiles for these apps automatically, could they not just recompile the binaries to exclude PPC?
Because there are fixes and optimizations specific to PPC. Devs would be pissed if they put effort into a version that's not supported. Apple has to tell devs that soon if that's what they have planned.
Apple is the biggest developer of LLVM, after it hired Chris Lattner who developed it at the University of Illinois. LLVM (http://llvm.org/) is really aimed at optimizing code as part of the compilation strategy, and is partly what Apple will use to replace gcc. gcc, while it has been fabulous, is showing its age, in that it has a lot of difficult code to maintain and improve, and it's easy to break things. Apple realized that if they rely on gcc as a compiler, there's not going to be revolutionary improvements in the produced code. So instead, they decided they needed a new back end for compilation, and that's llvm. They have also decided they need a new front end, which is the actual code parsing itself. Currently llvm relies on gcc for this, but Apple is developing a new compiler, called clang (http://clang.llvm.org/) which is already showing useful performance gains, though is early in its development. Looking at the sessions at WWDC, one of them on compiler technologies says:
"Xcode 3.1 introduces two new compilers for Mac OS X: GCC 4.2 and LLVM-GCC. Learn how the new security and performance improvements in GCC 4.2 can help you produce better applications. Understand the innovations in LLVM-GCC, and find out how you can use it in your own testing and development. Finally, get a preview of future compiler developments"
I suspect that Snow Leopard will be completely compiled by LLVM, though not sure whether they will have clang ready to act as the front end, so it may use gcc for that part. The result will end up being dramatically faster executables, even with no changes made to source code of the applications. However, given the APIs that they are developing for taking better advantage of the multiple cores and graphics chips, apps that take advantage of those (e.g. Quicktime X) will show even more dramatic performance gains. Another interesting thing about LLVM, is that you could ship code that is partway compiled, and then have the compilation finish on the target machine, meaning that it is optimized for a user's particular hardware (this is similar to what Gentoo Linux does, though you get the source in that case, rather than some intermediate compiled form). If it knows about your processor, and your graphics card, then there are certain additional optimizations that can be made at compile time, rather than having to figure out what code path to take at runtime.
While there may be no new "user visible features", as in a new app, or new UI, or new paradigm such as Expose, the amount of work that will have to go into developing Snow Leopard will be no less than the amount of effort that has gone into past releases. This is much more than a 10.5.x release - I'm expecting *some* applications to show more than 2x increases in performance. If you offered me a processor that was twice as fast for the cost of an OS update (who knows what or if it will cost, but it will certainly be no more than $129), I would buy it in an instant. I believe Snow Leopard will be just as good an investment.
From the clang page.
Current Status
Clang is still in early development stages. If you are looking for source analysis or source-to-source transformation tools, clang is probably a great solution for you. If you want to use it as a drop in C compiler, it is not yet ready.
Clang currently has pretty good parsing and semantic analysis support for C and Objective-C right now, and bugs are usually quickly fixed once reported. C++ support is still very early, and we don't expect to have respectable C++ support for another 2 years or so.