/dev/random

I should receive my new iMac tomorrow, so my tests were done on my DTK. Several sites have done performance tests showing the Intel iMac to be slower than a G5. However, anyone using a G4 (as I am) will see a big speedup with an Intel mac. I use a PowerBook as my primary [...]

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I’m looking forward to my new iMac (which is in Shanghai as I write this).
See the speed comparison here.

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I’ll be getting a new Intel iMac thanks to Apple’s DTK Exchange Program. I’m now setting up a server-based home directory, so I can access my email & other stuff from both my PowerBook and the iMac, which will become my primary machine.

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The latest version of XCode allows you to specify separate settings for x86 & PPC code, although it isn’t really obvious how to do it. After some digging I figured it out.
Some of the build settings such as SDKROOT & GCC_VERSION allow you to specify which architecture they apply to by appending _ppc or _i386 [...]

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I now have most of my code working on the Intel Mac. Once again, I need to reiterate this bit of advice: Never assume Macs are Big Endian.
We already have a cross platform product that works on both Macs & PCs. Since it deals with binary data read from a file, it needs to [...]

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I’ve created a new category, Mac x86 for all of my posts about porting to Intel. You can also subscribe to a feed for that category only here

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For any networking code, make sure you’re using htonl & htons when building a socket address structure. If you look at the structure you’re passing to connect(), the IP address & port should appear reversed. Dealing with these byte ordering issues can be very confusing. Always be aware of what byte order is expected for [...]

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I got a major part of my application working on the Intel Mac.
Here are a few macros I came up with to handle the byte ordering issues when reading & writing binary data from a file:

#define W(w) ((unsigned short)w)
#define WSWAP(w) (W((W(w) << 8 ) | (W(w) [...]

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The XCode debugger (and gdb) will confuse you with word & long values. For example, I have an IP address & port stored as the bytes 00 50 c0 a8 0 64 (that’s 192.168.0.100:80). Displaying memory in the debugger will show it as a8c05000 00006400 if you use the default word size of 4. [...]

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Never assume Macs are big-endian. I found code which uses #ifdef __MAC__ to decide whether byte order swapping is required - that’s just plain wrong.

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An IP address is not a long int - it’s 4 bytes. Doing something like this is bad:

sprintf(buf,”%ld.%ld.%ld.%ld”, (ip>>24) & 255, (ip>>16) & 255, (ip>> 8 ) & 255, ip & 255);

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Although I don’t have the x86 development system, I’ve been using XCode 2.1. For one of my projects, I was able to convert to x86 in less than 15 minutes. I simply opened the project in XCode 2.1, selected the 10.4 universal SDK, chose intel & ppc architectures, and made sure it was using GCC [...]

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