[Python-Dev] python, lipo and the future?

[Ronald Oussoren]

On Sep 17, 2006, at 8:56 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>
>> One of the announced features of osx 10.5 is 64-bit support  
>> throughout
>> the system and I definitely want to see if we can get 4-way universal
>> support on such systems. As I don't have a system that is capable of
>> running 64-bit code  I'm not going to worry too much about this right
>> now :-)
>
> Isn't this a size issue, also? There might be very few users of a  
> 64-bit
> binary (fewer even on PPC64 than on AMD64).

On Tiger it's primairily a useability issue: 64-bit binaries can't  
use most of the system API's because only the unix API (libSystem) is  
64-bit at the moment.

The size of the python installer would grow significantly for a 4-way  
universal distribution, it would be almost twice as large as the  
current distribution ("almost" because only binaries would grow in  
site, python source files and data files wouldn't grow in size).

>
> In addition: how does the system chose whether to create a 32-bit
> or a 64-bit process if the python binary is fat?

It should take the best fit, on 32-bit processors it picks the 32-bit  
version and on 64-bit processors it picks the 64-bit one.  This  
probably means that we'll have to ship multiple versions of the  
python executable, otherwise Tiger (10.4) users would end up with an  
interpreter that cannot use OSX-specific API's.

Ronald
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