Incredible speed ups on Leopard!?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jan 3, 2008, at 3:01 AM, Tabitha McNerney wrote:

> Thank you for providing a reality check (and thanks to Apple for  
> modifying Leopard's Tcl to speed things up). I wonder then, will  
> having a 64-bit operating system with 64-bit tools ( e.g., Xcode)  
> assist anywhere in the process of compiling a MacPort (or running a  
> MacPort)? I think I did read in a much earlier post several weeks  
> ago whereby someone asked a similar question about gaining 64-bit  
> binaries and I think I recall that the answer is that its possible  
> (but forgot the details of how -- perhaps just "automagic" with the  
> gcc compiler provided by Apple with Xcode dev tools?

I think that for the most part, the 64 bit environment is not going to  
impact MacPorts as a whole.  You gain some performance due to having  
the extra registers, but you also lose performance due to increased  
memory pressure and, at least right now, there's just no reason to  
compile something 64 bit unless it's the sort of application with a  
really large working set (scientific simulation, photo processing  
tools working on RAW images, etc).

- Jordan