Mac OS X Built For CISC, Not RISC

Posted by pudge on Monday October 21, 2002 @12:28AM from the registers-are-made-to-be-used dept.

WCityMike writes "One of the programmers at Unsanity, maker of haxies, recently posted a rather shocking relevation on the company's weblog. He says that Mac OS X's Mach-O runtime ABI (Application Binary Interface) comes from a NeXTStep design for 68K processorts, and is not designed for the PowerPC architechture. Had they used the latter, things would have been approximately 10-12 percent faster. And supposedly, they can't fix it now without breaking all existing applications." The developer mentions there are workarounds in the newest GCC, but only for newly compiled programs.

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NeXTStep 68k or x86 ?! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-21 08:59 · Score: 0, Redundant

Since the most recent versions of NeXTStep were also released in Intel versions, perhaps this has more to do with code from the Intel x86 branch than the ( truly legacy ) x86 branch?
Perhaps...