Snow Leopard is out! And why you will not have VLC 64bits right now...

28 August 2009

Apple OS X 10.6 is out

If you have missed the news, then you are not on the same techy blogs than I am.

So, Apple new operating system Mac OS X.6, named Snow Leopard is out, and it improves a lot the speed, and ports most of its application to 64bits, but doesn’t introduce any important new feature. Learn more about it !

VLC and 64bits

Do you really need 64bits for a video application? I seriously doubt it. But well, you might want/need it in the future.

Linux

VLC 64bits runs on 64bits linux since a long time, and I use it a lot. No majors problems since Linux is cleverly engineered.

Windows

VLC runs on Windows 64 as a Win32 application, but we haven’t finished the port to Win64, especially because of external libraries issues. It will come eventually.

Mac OS X

Since the WWDC ‘08, we know we have to remove all Carbon code, and we have mostly done it.

Leopard

VLC 64bits runs on 32bits Leopard without issues.

Snow Leopard

As one of our OSX developers says: I’ve you had asked me a month ago, I had said that everything is cool and VLC64 will be released the same day as Snow Leopard.

BUT

It doesn’t work now, because of a change in the Cocoa runtime. VLC stopped working in the last two seeds (the GM and the one prior to it).

Launching VLC results in crashes in a low level function called _NSBundleCreate, which is triggered by a whole bunch of Cocoa and IOKit methods. Basically every method of these frameworks results in a crash on Snow Leopard. This is strange, as exactly the same code runs nicely in 64bit on Leopard and prior seeds of Snow Leopard.

The problem is that VLC is not an ordinary NSApplication, but a plain C app, that loads a Cocoa plugin, which instantiates NSApp itself. Therefore, you cannot reproduce the crashes in normal Cocoa apps.

Conclusion

Apple, once again, breaks everything with a new OS, as it happens often, or when a new version of Xcode gets out. Last version of Xcode forced us to drop X.4 if we wanted to go 64bits and compatible with Snow Leopard. Seriously, I don’t get it.

I have applications that are running on the Win7 64bit setup that are Win98 games!

Anyway, to not finish on a bad note, Snow Leopard looks gorgeous!

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

64bits
Apple
Leopard
MacOS X
Snow Leopard
VLC
VLC Media Player
Windows 64

Comments

  1. On 30 May 30300, 3:46 by psoeer

    Took some manual changes but c’mon…is it really that hard not to make changes to the security/cocoa base without breaking things?

  2. On 29 May 29290, 12:14 by Joey

    Yep. Apple’s changes caused my VPN software to stop working too. I found some ways http://www.rapidskunk.com to get about this but still having some problems.

  3. On 1 May 1010, 9:58 by mike

    I’ve heard there are some wildlife groups trying to get Apple to do more stuff with the actual S.L.’s lol. I don’t know- people are saying it’s good PR for Apple- they should jump on that.

  4. On 25 May 25250, 2:38 by Musa

    Yep. Apple’s changes caused my VPN software to stop working. Took some manual changes but c’mon…is it really that hard not to make changes to the security/cocoa base without breaking things?

    I’ll have to stick with Perian for the time being and gag QT 10.

  5. On 14 May 14140, 10:37 by JBK

    @sadf: breaking major applications by changing runtime for security reasons, 2 weeks before release, is not a good QA. Deal with it.

    Anyway, this will be fixed for 1.0.2.

  6. On 11 May 11110, 7:55 by sadf

    Sorry but don’t blame your unstandard patchwork codes failure on apple. Plenty of osx apps have no issues.

  7. On 29 May 29290, 4:30 by JBK

    @Max: yeah, like when you have minor updates of Xcode that breaks linker, or compiling of ASM… Apple doesn’t seem to really care about old versions, that seems to be quite recurrent.

  8. On 28 May 28280, 2:49 by Max Howell

    BREAKS EVEYTHINFG!!!!1!! EVERYTHINGSSSSSS!!

    Oh, actually, one thing.

  9. On 28 May 28280, 1:52 by JBK

    “Voir le bien dans le mal: bonne philosophie!”

  10. On 28 May 28280, 12:44 by Pierre d'Herbemont

    Actually this part of VLC code is also crashing on Leopard randomly - less often. VLC is doing a buggy stuff here.

    You can see it the other way around, we are now forced to fix this bug.

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