Since Mac OS X 10.6 is coming out tomorrow I thought I’d give an update on 64-bit Gecko for Mac OS X. Progress is tracked on Mozilla bug 468509.
We’re very close to having running builds. We still need to replace some old API usage related to complex text input and print dialogs, but aside from that I do not know of any other major work items. We have come a long way and we will have builds within a month. As soon as we can produce them we’ll start working on getting a 64-bit Mac OS X 10.6 tinderbox set up to produce nightly builds.
We have not made any decisions about shipping an officially supported 64-bit build for Mac OS X. I suspect at some point we will make the decision to remove the PPC architecture from our universal binary and replace it with x86-64 but like I said, we have not made any decisions yet.
Just in case anyone is confused, it’s probably worth noting that the current (32bit) builds of Firefox will work fine on 10.6.
Why is it such a priority to have 64 bit builds on Mac if the 32 bit builds work? I asked about 64 bit Windows builds and the answer was the 32 bit versions work so there’s no rush. Is the situation like 64 bit linux OSes where the 32 bit libraries may not be there? Does windows have both 32 bit and 64 bit libraries?
How will this affect performance?
You comment that at some point, Mozilla will remove PPC code from the universal binary. That’s clearly inevitable eventually, but I hope it won’t be especially soon! Leopard has full support for PPC (even if Snow Leopard doesn’t), and I expect that Apple will continue to support it for a good while yet. I hope Mozilla won’t be too terribly far ahead of them in leaving us remaining PPC users behind. (I wouldn’t complain if I just had to download a different PPC-only file, mind you.)
I’m not speaking on any sort of authority, but I would assume that PPC support would remain until support for 10.5 was dropped.
So how long will it be before we get 64-bit Windows builds?
IIRC, the architecture of OSX allows for some speed gains with a 64 bit kernel, it’s more important for VMWare and other kext developers to provide 64 bit drivers, and for libraries to be 32/64 Universal Binary to ensure more compatibility (MySQL for example to allow it to run as 64 bit but link with 32 bit perl).
Here is one article.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/04/road_to_snow_leopard_twice_the_ram_half_the_price_64_bits.html
When I complete my moving… I can also provide citations from Amit Singh’s book.