[geeks] Wooh - Mac OS X.2

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> > The dev. kit is part of the OS on 6.5.x, and is available for free for
> > previous versions of the OS.  GCC sucks, but it is usable if you can't
> > afford MIPSpro.
>
> I'm highly worried about the compatibility problems I hear about.

Compatibility problems?  I've had more problems making the shit code out
there compatible with MIPSpro than I have with GCC.  Now, granted GCC has
that structure-passing bug, but there are workarounds for some of them.
So long as you don't need certain semaphore functions, it works.  It
probably works better in 64-bit mode, though.

The reason I hate using GCC on IRIX is because the code generation sucks,
the optimization sucks, and it accepts illegal and/or ambiguous code as
perfectly legit.

> You obviously haven't paid too much attention to many of the things
> I've talked about doing.

Not too much, no.

> I'm the guy who would really be pushing the video and disk systems of
> any machine I purchase.  I stream video through GL textures.

This has been a "neat hack" under IRIX since the Indy days.  It's doable
on any machine that supports video I/O and hardware texture-mapping.

> Turn pictures to colored vertexs,

That seems more CPU-bound than gfx-bound, if I'm understanding that
correctly.

> load 30 megs models and want to work on the interactively.  I apply
> linear algebra in strange ways to colors, and want all of it in
> realtime.

Realtime is what you make of it.  I have no idea how well Aqua (or
whatever it is on OSX that actually drives the UI and event system) holds
up to moving that much data around.

That said, if you just need an assload of gfx memory to hold your
geometry, a GeForce 4MX is cheaper than a IR2 gfx cardset.

> I want my own inferno[1] on a budget.  I want to quickly prototype
> ideas, then combine them together into larger usefull programs.

You're probably going to want good OOP support.  IRIX has this in C++.
OSX has this in Objective C.  I don't particularly like either of them,
but Java3D has been way too slow for me in the past.

> Well for starters, good video apis.  dmedia seems OK, but from I've
> seen quicktime and the carbon classes are far nicer.

Have you looked at that class-library that abstracts over dmedia (can't
think of its name right now)?

> All the pieces are available for free.  But the idea is to save time
> so I can focus on the cool stuff, not on adding one more picture or
> video codec to my program.

Certainly.  If you want lots and lots of video with a transparent codec
interface, you probably want Quicktime, or Video for Windows, but I'm
guessing that you're Not Going There.

> I could use a second processor for processing the next frame of video
> while the first one finishs up the current frame.

I know this is probably what you mean, but try to think of this in terms
of threads, as opposed to in terms of CPUs (that is, let the OS handle CPU
affinity).  There's a possibility that Apple might go beyond 2 CPUs
sometime this century.

> When I push my machine, the main process is the main process.  There is
> no seperate compiling, databases[2], and web browsing is idle.

I was just giving you my situation.  Of course you may use any CPU for
anything you like.

> But increasingly I want an Octane, and the cost of video IO on it is
> just so so high.

s/video/any auxilliary/

SGI make great hardware, but this would be the pain of vendor-specific
buses.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
  "gnu: we aim to fuck up everything with the potential to not suck"
                                                   --alex j avriette