Could anyone direct me to the right person for these please? Some of them are FPC-user related vs. -developer related but I like to ask them all in one
post.

a) How do we use fpc/laz to make Mach-O fat binaries? b) Which versions was the first to support Intel Macs and which version was the first to support G5 64-bit PPC ?
c) How did the community made a tranition to G5 as well as the Intel Macs in terms of related modifications in the original FPC compilers (which sections in general, was it the fpc itself or did you use other compilers, etc )? d) I am still not used to Cocoa and Objective-C (Intel Leopard 10.5) however it makes sense for me to ask how does fpc/laz link to the Cocoa libraries/frameworks? So for instance under WinTel there's the C/C++ DLLs and the compiler can use the right calling conventions (WIN_API) to coimmunicate with them (as an interface) -- so what's the mechanism for MacOSX ? LCL does use Cocoa doesn't it ? and if I'm not wrong Cocoa is mostly or totally in ObjC...

thanks

London Disney wrote

a) How do we use fpc/laz to make Mach-O fat binaries?

Compile the different versions separately and then combine them using the "lipo" tool.

b) Which versions was the first to support Intel Macs and which

2.2.0

version was the first to support G5 64-bit PPC ?

2.4.0 (on Mac OS X at least, it was supported earlier on Linux). Of course, 32 bit PPC code runs just fine on G5's.

c) How did the community made a tranition to G5 as well as the Intel Macs in terms of related modifications in the original FPC compilers (which sections in general, was it the fpc itself or did you use other compilers, etc )?

I don't understand what you are asking here. Are you asking how the compiler was modified ("related modifications in the original FPC compilers"), whether people writing programs with FPC switched to other compilers ("or did you use other compilers"), or something else?

In any case, I think that very few people ever compiled PPC64 apps on Mac OS X (even with GCC), since there are very few advantages in doing so (the only real ones are if you have a lot of 64 bit arithmetic, or need a lot of memory). And only as of Mac OS X 10.5 it was possible to create 64 bit gui apps.

With FPC 2.4.x and earlier: http://wiki.freepascal.org/PasCocoa With FPC 2.5.x and later: http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_PasCocoa

Jonas

That's great help Jonas; thanks.

As with my question (c), yes I mean what in the compiler did you need to modify or focus on the most ?

It's a bit broad may be but I think you only need to really worry about the code-generation for, say, G5 64-bit ABI and instruction set ? The rest of the code shouldn't need much change.

London Disney wrote

As with my question (c), yes I mean what in the compiler did you need to modify or focus on the most ?

As far as adding Darwin/PPC64 support: very little, since someone else had already added Linux/PPC64 support.

It's a bit broad may be but I think you only need to really worry about the code-generation for, say, G5 64-bit ABI and instruction set ? The rest of the code shouldn't need much change.

You can find a summary of the darwin/ppc64 changes in this log entry (amongst some unrelated changes): http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi?view=rev&revision=6720

Jonas

that will answer. thanks again.