[Kevin Walzer] [Apple] has announced its transition to the Intel platform in 2006 after more than a decade on PPC. To ease the transition for developers, it is providing support for "universal binaries"--compilation to support both the legacy PPC platform and the new Intel platform. See http://developer.apple.com/transition/index.html for more information.

How are Tcl/Tk developers on the Mac dealing with the transition to Intel? 

A few notes:

   * [Daniel Steffen] has already committed new makefiles and [Xcode] projects that make building Tcl/Tk as a universal binary simple. See http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/tcl-mac/2920946 for complete details. 

   * Extensions are a trickier matter. While many extensions such as [Img] are already included by default on [MacOS X], and should presumably run without problem on Mactel, other extensions are not. [Tile], [Tclkit], [Starkit], etc. are not yet available as universal binaries. My efforts to get Tile to build so far have not been successful (bug report filed at SF). 

   * I discuss a few other points about the transition at http://www.wordtech-software.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=10.

   * Some details on how to compile Universal binaries that also run on 10.2 http://www.macmegasite.com/drupal/node/2583

Others are invited to post their experiences/perspectives/solutions on the Mactel transition.

[Kevin Walzer] UPDATE (11 January 2006): I've decided to stick with the Tcl/Tk core, which is already "universal" thanks to the hard work of [Daniel Steffen], and rely only on pure-Tcl extensions or compiled extensions that Apple ships with its OS (see http://tcltkaqua.sourceforge.net/tiger) on both PPC and Mactel machines. This means, for the time being, removing Tile and other extensions that don't trivially compile as universal binaries. I'm doing this with both my open-source and commercial/shareware products. See http://www.wordtech-software.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=12 for more details.
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[Category Porting]