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Text File | 1993-05-25 | 12.3 KB | 226 lines | [TEXT/SNTE]

Tuesday, May 25, 1993 12:52:35 AM Power PC Item From: Bud Man Subject: PowerPC2 To: Power PC MACWEEK, 03/22/93 COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1993 By Jeff Ubois Developers are enthusiastic about writing for the PowerPC because of the increased speed and new features it will make possible. By Jeff Ubois Despite some uncertainties, software publishers are making firm commitments to port their applications to the new PowerPC machines. "Every time you go to a new level of performance you get existing or new companies coming up with great ideas of what to do with it," said Eric Harslem, Apple vice president for desktop products. A little less than a year ago, developing products for the PowerPC might have seemed a bit risky. But Apple now stresses that it will phase out the 680x0 line and replace it with the PowerPC. "Three to five years from now I think all Mac customers except at the very low end will be buying the PowerPC," Harslem said. Developers' reactions to the PowerPC and Apple's efforts to help them port applications are generally positive. "Microsoft is very enthusiastic," said Benjamin Waldman, manager of Macintosh technology at Redmond, Wash-based Microsoft Corp. "What is really exciting about the PowerPC is you have a lot more power available, and you know there are a lot of processor-intensive things that will work a lot better." Although existing Mac applications will run under the PowerPC's emulation mode, "We want to go beyond that; you need native code to take advantage of the speed of the chip," Waldman said. "We'll have Word and Excel for the PowerPC available when [the PowerPC-based Macs] ship." And for users, availability of software written in native code is key to justifying the purchase of a PowerPC-based machine. Developers' perspectives. Developers of high-end applications share Waldman's enthusiasm, partly because of the chip's speed but also for the new features it will enable. "Color publishing just screams for more horsepower," said Dave Roberts, director of publishing products at Seattle-based Aldus Corp. Roberts added that faster speeds could also increase user productivity by allowing activities such as repagination to run in the background. Programs that tax current Mac models - and sometimes their users' patience - should deliver much better performance and thus win a wider audience once ported to the PowerPC. Officials of Insignia Solutions Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., for example, said that SoftPC, its IBM PC emulator software, achieves 486 performance and more on RISC platforms. Others argue that even routine applications could use more speed. "If you look at word processing, you might say you can type only so fast, so why do you need this kind of power?" said Brad Burnham, president of Echo Logic Inc. of Holmdel, N.J. "Yet there are people in the newspaper business, for example, where justification and hyphenation runs take forever, even on Quadras. There are also many users running large businesses on a spreadsheet, and for them even spreadsheets have become real CPU hogs." Microsoft's Waldman agreed that the PowerPC will be a boon for users of large spreadsheets, especially those who want to add extra touches such as QuickTime movies. Still, the appeal of lightning-fast traditional applications is limited. As Harslem put it, "MacWrite running 10 times faster won't have overwhelming appeal to the average user." So developers also are looking to create new applications and beef up existing ones with innovative features. Most developers are vague about specific new features the PowerPC will enable, but voice recognition, handwriting recognition, modemless telephony, 3-D graphics and video are usually mentioned. Multiplatform developers. Companies that already have products running on multiple platforms probably have an edge in developing for the PowerPC. "We always want faster hardware, and we're not worried about porting difficulties because our software already runs on several platforms, including the RS/6000, from which the PowerPC is derived," said Doug Stein, member of the technical staff of the MathLink Development Group at Wolfram Research Inc. of Champaign, Ill. Chris Butler, manager of Macintosh development at Frame Technology Corp. of San Jose, Calif., said: "FrameMaker is already ported to 30 platforms, so we've worked through a lot of the kinks associated with going over to different architectures. We are very enthusiastic about making a PowerPC product." Like Stein and others, Butler applauded Apple's efforts to help the developer community. "Apple has done a good job in getting information out to developers. Overall, the disclosure level has been pretty good," he said. Uncertainties. Even developers committed to the PowerPC are wrestling with numerous uncertainties about marketing, the quality and availability of tools and compilers, and how to port their code. Waldman said Microsoft was uncertain whether software for the PowerPC would be considered an upgrade or treated as a new and separate version. "We have to think about pricing and distribution issues," Waldman said. "For example, do you ship both versions in the same box? If you have two boxes, will dealers want to stock all your different versions?" Manny Menendez, president of Deneba Software of Miami, said his company would probably offer a PowerPC version of Canvas as an upgrade. "Right now, we are planning to handle it as an upgrade rather than a new version and [treat] the PowerPC as if it were just another Mac model," he said. "But, of course, that is subject to change without notice." Others are thinking about potential technical problems. "There are tons of uncertainties," said Frame Technology's Butler. "Are the compilers good enough to produce good code? That is the one I am focused on." Apple is pushing developers to use American National Standards Institute C code and will be offering a new C/C++ compiler developed with Lucid Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif. In the meantime, Apple recommends IBM Corp.'s compiler for the RS/6000 as an interim means to clean up old code. Wolfram's Stein also has doubts about the C compiler. "For us, the question is whether the C compiler Apple is going to use is good or not; if the tools are acceptable, then we are fine." Third-party tools are another issue, but several companies are working on the problem. "We are working with Apple with the intention of supporting our development tools on the PowerPC," said Steven Levine, product marketing manager for the Bedrock framework at Symantec Corp. of Cupertino, Calif. "We think the PowerPC will provide excellent performance for developers using our cross- platform development tools." Porting the code. Porting 680x0 programs for the Mac - often written in a hodgepodge of Pascal, C, C++, assembly and other languages - to the rigid C code needed by the PowerPC is shaping up to be a serious challenge. Developers have several options to choose from: > Rewrite code from scratch. > Recompile their code if it is already in C or C++. > Translate their source code manually, then recompile. > Use Echo Logic's FlashPort binary-level translator. > Rely on Apple's 680x0 emulator. According to developers, complete rewrites probably won't be necessary often. "The programmatic interface in the PowerPC will be identical to the Mac," said Echo Logic's Burnham, "so rewrites are not to take advantage of new functionality but to improve the cross- platform capabilities and go back to clean up old code to improve performance and shrink code size." For example, he said, developers may want to write a more GUIindependent code base so they can use shared libraries for their Mac and Windows versions. Pros and cons. According to developers, programs written using ANSIstandard versions of C probably can be recompiled easily. "The recompile is going to be the most attractive option for people who have relatively portable code," Burnham said. Companies with large investments in a Pascal code base have several options. Language Systems Corp. of Herndon, Va., is developing a Pascal compiler that will create native PowerPC code. "We expect to ship in July, and the price will be a few hundred rather than a few thousand dollars," said company Chairman and CEO Rich Norling. Sierra Software Innovation of Incline Village, Nev., is offering p2c, an automatic Pascal-to-C language translator. The company also offers engineering and translation services. Assembly-language translation tools are available from MicroAPL Ltd. of London. Echo Logic's FlashPort takes a completely different approach. It performs binary-level translations to native PowerPC code from a variety of sources. The company, which is working closely with Apple, said its approach allows it to generate native PowerPC code from Mac applications written using different languages and different compilers. "We don't care whether the code is Pascal, C, Modula 2, assembly or any combination of those," Burnham said. "When you do a source- level translation, you have a great sense of optimism because in a matter of a day or so it gives you 90 percent of the code automatically generated. But the question is, what does it take to fix the remaining 10 percent?" Burnham said Echo Logic would announce prices and a shipping date soon. Finally, the PowerPC also will run plain-vanilla Mac applications using an emulation mode expected to offer performance at least equivalent to the Mac IIci. Some companies will use the emulator to run portions of their code that they don't want to port. Wolfram's Stein, for example, explained that Mathematica on the Mac uses two binaries, a kernel and the user interface. Wolfram may simply port the kernel, which is where most of the performance increase will be noticed, and let the user-interface module run on the emulator. Others say the emulator just isn't fast enough. "The emulator works very nicely, but it is slow compared with what the PowerPC is capable of doing," Butler said. "I wouldn't encourage someone to buy a PowerPC and run FrameMaker in emulation mode." Worth the wait? Clearly, the PowerPC is changing the way developers think about the Mac, their product lines, as well as emerging voice, video and handwriting applications. The PowerPC also will transform Apple's networking strategies. PowerPCbased servers could help the company expand its foothold in corporate networks. And the chip's faster speeds could swamp existing networks, requiring 100-Mbps Ethernet or Fiber Distributed Data Interface. Developers agreed that the availability of software is vital to the success of the PowerPC. Ultimately, how quickly users begin adopting the PowerPC is directly related to when PowerPC software really becomes available. BEGIN TABLE PowerPC porting options for developers Porting method Advantages Disadvantages Emulation Free, takes no work Slow Recompile code Fast, straightforward Not always possible Source translation Quick first cut Details may take time to fix FlashPort Fast, handles multiple Available from only (binary translation) language types one vendor END TABLE Developers already are beginning to get a sense of where problems are likely to crop up when porting their applications to PowerPC machines. "There are three areas where people will get into trouble," said Doug Stein, member of the technical staff of the MathLink Development Group at Wolfram Research Inc. of Champaign, Ill. "One is if they are depending on the control definition function, code that is inherently 68000 code; another is if they are using a lot of assembly language; and the third is the issue of floating point because the size of the floating point is different on the PowerPC from 68000 Macs." Rich Norling, chairman and CEO of Language Systems Corp. of Herndon, Va., warned that many developers will have to modify their applications because the PowerPC supports only single- and double- precision math, not the extended precision format available on the 680x0 family. "Applications that use floating-point data types can't use automatic translation on assembly language," he said. "Those folks will have to switch their application to double precision and recompile."