Intel said that it plans later this year to offer test versions of software tools aimed at allowing Mac developers to improve the performance of programs that run on its chips. The software maker said that later this year it will offer beta versions of both its compiler and its performance libraries, which contain code optimised for both digital media and scientific computing tasks.
Smith said it was not clear when a final version of the Intel tools will be made available, saying the company wants to learn more about how Mac developers differ from their Windows and Linux counterparts. Smith said that when Intel added Linux support it found that programmers used significantly different programming dialects.
It shouldn’t be all that difficult to find out that Mac developers require Objective C support …
In the eweek article ( http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1851752,00.asp ) they say they will not provide support for Objective-C.
I think their current Mac strategy is fatally flawed.
Can’t really blame them: Objective-C/Cocoa is a delightful environment, but it’s used by a small % of developers on a single low marketshare platform. Unfortunately, GNUstep is not a commercially viable alternative yet and it’s the only other game in town.
Wait 6 months: Intel may reconsider if Apple screams loudly enough. Cocoa is a nonplayer with the big developers who matter to Apple; a better compiler that didn’t bother to support Objective-C wouldn’t really change anything, but would look very bad (as in limiting Cocoa to Apple and hobbyists with no commercial aspirations.)
It’s not all that hard to support Objective-C anyway (it was originally just a preprocessor and runtime library.) Apple’s Objective-C++ extension is harder but it makes OC so much more powerful and usable that it’s a no brainer – if one cares: the gcc guys don’t enough even to incorporate the patches Apple gave them a few years back; MW never enabled OC on their x86 compiler (no reason to for Windows, and most GNUstep folks don’t buy software.)
You says that one can’t really blame Intel because of the small market Mac OS X represent. Ok, but this does not change the fact that without Objective-C support, their Mac strategy is flawed, because Objective-C is the main development language on Mac, and because the native Mac OS X object frameworks are written in (and for) Objective-C.
And, BTW, currently every serious C compiler vendors for Mac OS X supports Objective-C: Apple in GCC, IBM in XLF, and Metrowerks in CodeWarrior.
Ok, but this does not change the fact that without Objective-C support, their Mac strategy is flawed, because Objective-C is the main development language on Mac, and because the native Mac OS X object frameworks are written in (and for) Objective-C.
Flawed is in the eye of the beholder: if they gave a language and no one came…. How much work is being done in Cocoa, except at Apple and various shareware writers’ garages? It’s a good system, sure, but among the big software companies that make or break the Apple brand, it’s rare indeed. Cocoa is a way to show loyalty (by eschewing compatibility with anything else) or for a very small developer to gain a competitive advantage (it really is that much better, under the right circumstances. So were QuickDraw3D, and OpenDoc….)
What I said was that Intel doesn’t really care, because they know how few will use their compiler for Objective-C versus the latest template silliness. Most people with a budget that develop for Mac’s have to ship real products on multiple OS’s, and therefore don’t use Cocoa. Accessing the system frameworks from C isn’t all that hard, vastly easier than using COM on Windows.
The question is whether Apple will intercede w/ Intel for their own marketing purposes: they’ve already shown how much they care about MW, which was the only, not just the best, way to make PPC programs for the first year of the PPC transition (and the single biggest reason Apple survived it.) The Intel compiler is nice to have, not crucial.
And, BTW, currently every serious C compiler vendors for Mac OS X supports Objective-C: Apple in GCC, IBM in XLF, and Metrowerks in CodeWarrior.
Apple doesn’t count, and calling MetroWerks a “serious” vendor is a bit of a stretch these days, but they did have good support and an excellent compiler. Their big weakness compared to XCode was system integration and debugging, not to mention Apple support (and they still win.)
I’ve never used the IBM compiler, or heard of anyone who did. I recall the old Motorola compilers for PPC being expensive and having compatibility issues with everyone else.
The real problem is that there aren’t many serious compilers for PowerPC. Unfortunately, the market is too small to interest any big players, and thereby motivate Apple to provide better tools.
Talk about uninformed. A great number of commercial apps make use of ObjC, for their GUIs anyways.
While obviously, for crossplatform capability, the core logic is done in a more portable manner (C or C++), nothing beats ObjC (more specifically Cocoa) for making GUIs on the Mac. Sure, there’s Carbon. And yes, there’s Java. But they don’t offer quite as much power and flexibility and as smooth of an end-result as Cocoa (with ObjC) does on OS X.
And commercial developers are using it. Just ask Blizzard, who do the Mac front end for their games with Cocoa. And while Adobe and Microsoft tend to use Carbon for historical reasons, these days their latest versions use Cocoa for some of their GUIs (since Cocoa and Carbon can be mixed).
The fact is, ObjC is a very important on Mac OS X, and can’t be ignored if Intel wants folks to use their compiler.
This is Intel…
http://www.swallowtail.org/naughty-intel.html
And I am Trolling Along :p
Have fun!
-iMoron
Shame on Intel.
If Intel wants to charge more, they should give us a better CPU rather than try to make AMD CPU slower by deliberately producing slower code.
I feel so good that all my PCs have AMD CPUs. ^_^
This is a very good article! It is a recommended read.
Thanks.