[epp-dev] Mac OS X: No 64-bit packages?

[Reinier Zwitserloot <reinier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

See

http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/epp-dev/msg00666.html

http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/article.php?id=233&group=eclipse.technology.packaging#233

for some background.


You can't run eclipse in 64-bit mode on Mac OS X, because, even though  
the cocoa-64bit bindings are available, all the downloads on  
eclipse.org/download come in carbon (32-bit) and cocoa (32-bit)  
flavours. I can respect the need to keep the number of packages down,  
but this seems like the very worst possible combination! As you may  
know, java 1.6 on mac os x only runs in 64-bit mode. Therefore, with  
these packages you can run eclipse only in java 1.5, which is rather  
annoying:

 - java 1.6 is far faster than java 1.5.
 - For those with the memory working on big projects, giving eclipse  
a tonne of memory is nice, but of course that can only work in a 64- 
bit JVM.
 - You can't use java 1.6 features when writing eclipse plugins for  
your own use.

I therefore suggest any one of the following steps:

1. Replace the packages with "carbon 32-bit" and "cocoa 64-bit".  
Apparently (see links at the top of this email) some people still need  
the carbon build, but nobody could possibly need the 32-bit cocoa  
build, as it's brand new!

 2. Supply the 64-bit SWT jnilib and the 32-bit SWT jnilib in the  
same cocoa build, so that the cocoa build is 32/64-bit agnostic and  
runs on either. I presume this isn't as easy as it sounds otherwise  
someone would have undoubtedly done this already.

 --Reinier Zwitserloot