Re: Rosetta-a-like is absolutely necessary
@diodesign:
"Dunno, dude. Gonna have to disagree. Applications could ship with Arm and x86 inside, with the right one running depending on the underlying hardware. It's not that hard to understand."
When Apple shifted Macs from the 68k CPU line to PowerPC, and then from PowerPC to Intel, that is exactly the approach it used in both cases.
Also, in both cases, Apple provided CPU emulation so that you could continue to use (most) old applications on the new CPU regardless - at least for a while.
IIRC, Apple only dropped the ability to use 68k applications when it shifted Macs to Intel, largely because that side of things was handled by an emulator which ran inside the Classic environment (MacOS 9.2.2-ish magically running inside/alongside MacOS X, don't ask me about the details) and re-writing all that code so it'd work on Intel/MacOS X didn't strike Apple as worth the effort and who can blame them?
So, based on what Apple's done in the past, I'd guess that if Macs are moved from Intel to ARM CPUs, then we will again be given a combination of an Intel emulator running on ARM so old applications will continue to run, and also applications shipping with executable code for both CPUs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
