March 12, 2005
- Cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86 - In drawing up a vision for how to turbocharge the Mozilla Foundation's build farm, I've read many cool things that could lead to builds taking very little time. One of the cooler ideas (but not the coolest) is to cross-compile our Mac builds straight from Intel x86 boxes. I've asked around the office and while we all agree that this is intriguing, we wonder what drawbacks we might face. Do we lose a lot of optimizations we would otherwise get if we were compiling natively? Of course, the resulting binaries would need to be sent to a Mac platform for testing, but if we could more closely tie our build farm story to one type of hardware platform (instead of needing G4s, G5s, and/or Xserve G5s, as well), we would be able to go farther, faster, and do so at less cost. Anyone out there have experience with cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86? Did your build systems go mad and cause your hard drives to spin out of control? Did your Intel x86 box instantly take on the silver gleam of an Xserve? Spin your tall tales (with a dose of truth about whether or not it actually worked) here!... (20:59 | 17 Comments)