macOS 32bit building reenabled

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Thanks to sleuthing from you guys was able to reenable macOS 32bit building from bits of the 9.6.1 Standalone Builder files/scripts.

Unfortunately now its ONLY building 32bit, I might have to backtrack some.
I'm trying to make it do separate builds for 32 and 64bit (no fat building) but it would probably be easier to just let it do its lipo 'slicing' thing from the 9.6.1 standalone 32/64-fat binary, and build 64bit from 9.6.3 standalone 64-fat binary.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not even sure if there is even any difference in the 64bit Standalone binary data between these two versions. Will have to use a HEX or binary DIFF with a DIFF utility that can handle binary files.

But at least I was able to build 32bit standalone from my OXT 0.963, and tested on BigSur+ (building) and ran on my old, old rig running Yosemite 10.10.5. I'll try test running on 10.6 and 10.14 (last 32bit compatible macOS) once I get the 32/64 separation sorted, but it should work.

mac32bitBuilding.png (193.42 KiB) Viewed 3004 times

Unfortunately the time I can use to work on OXT has suddenly been cut (even further) for the foreseeable future.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Still working on this (when I have time).

Currently, in my current build for 32bit or 32+64bit the SB uses the 'fat' standalone runtime app from 9.6.1
If you're building for macOS 64bit only, it will use the 64bit only standalone runtime app from 9.6.3.

Not sure how much this is really worth putting time and effort into. I believe all but the earliest Intel Macs run the 64bit kernel. I tested a 32 bit build on Snow Leopard (10.6) but the app wouldn't launch, this probably only helps if you're still running a Mac with Lion (10.7) in 32 bit mode for some reason (perhaps because the Mac has only 32bit driver for iGPU (GMA X3100).

[richmond62]

I don't know why you cannot apply ALL your transforms to the code base of 961 instead of 963 . . .

[richmond62]

What is the objection to 'fat' builds? Is it that MacOS 11 'Big Slur' takes umbrage at apps that contain any non-64-bit code?

While it would be lovely to have 32 & 64 Mac builds, as per Linux, fatties might have to suffice.

[tperry2x]

Well, I've been messing about and I've created something which seems to work.
I've just taken all the mods from OpenXTalk Lite 0.91 - based on the Livecode Community 9.6.1, and applied them to a build of OpenXTalk Lite 0.91 based on Livecode Community 9.6.3 instead (I may call it 0.92 for clarity).

Why?
Well, because I wanted all the bug fixes between 9.6.1 and 9.6.3 (as far as I can go with all the changes they made in the community versions).

The nice thing about this, is that it may be 9.6.3 under the surface, but it builds Mac standalones for 64-bit and 32-bit.


So, even though I've just built these apps on Linux, I wanted to test them on MacOS X, and they do indeed work:

(Please note I've shown the 'kind' column in Activity Monitor, so I could see if they were running in 32-bit or 64-bit mode.

Success?
So I'm now thinking that I can base my future builds on 9.6.3 instead. Also, these aren't 'Fat' binaries (universal), they are architecture-specific, which is nice.

Funny really, as I started poking around with this today in the hope of reducing the standalone sizes, but I went off on a tangent.

[micmac]

It is really nice that you have taken over where Terry left of, tperry2x (as I understand it)

Thanks
Mic

[OpenXTalkPaul]

What is the objection to 'fat' builds? Is it that MacOS 11 'Big Slur' takes umbrage at apps that contain any non-64-bit code?

While it would be lovely to have 32 & 64 Mac builds, as per Linux, fatties might have to suffice.

Yes exactly, IFAIK from macOS versions after 10.14 Mohave it's a no-no to have any 32bit code in your binary executables (apps and plugin binaries which killed off some favorite old synth plugins). No 32bit compiled stuff runs on macOS 10.15+.

While I could likely fairly easily back-port all the IDE changes from OXT 9.6.3 to LCC 9.6.1, it's like Terry said, I wouldn't want to loose any of the Engine(s) (there's like 10 or so 'Engines' involved) changes and fixes between 9.6.1 and 9.6.3. Continuing on from 9.6.3, at least for the main OXT project, just makes the most sense to me.

That said, because I'm being forced to clean out my garage and therefore go through the various older computer rigs I have out there, the last week or so I have been playing around on those boxes (after getting some up and running again) with LCC 6.6.5,6.6.7,7.x,and 8.1.5 on SnowLeo macOS 10.6.8. Why? Because there are retro-computing people out there (including me) that still like to run stuff on old systems like PowerPC. I still have a MDD G4 that works better then ever, maxed to 1.5GB RAM and SSD (but no G5 to test PPC64...was there ever even a PPC64 LCC build?)

LCC 6.6.5 it seems was the last version that could convert HyperCard stacks without crashing the IDE engine and could run on 10.4 Tiger & PowerPC Macs. I did some brief experimenting with building a FAT (x86-32bit & PPC 32bit) standalone HC stack converter that tries to auto-edit the script differences between HyperTalk and LCS, there's probably too many cases where scripts need to be edited to make automating the process, but I was able to open 'Beyond HyperCard" from Cyan with it to do a save as tFilename & ".livecode"... In OXT x86-64bit 0.963.1 an early change was adding script to catch attempts to open HyperCard stacks on macOS (open stack... or If 'WILD' .stack files are associated with OXT and then are double-clicked in the Finder) and redirects the 'open stack' request to 'HyperCardPreview.app' if it's installed.

LCC 7.x was the last Mac version that included Chromium (CEF) for revBrowser on macOS (Win/Linux still did until last LCC version), which is a completely different JavaScript engine then WebKit (Safari) that later Mac versions use. I'm pretty sure there's newer builds of CEF that could work on 32bit Mac? This revBrowser CEF could use web plugins installed on the system and I know this because I was using JZZMIDI web plug-in for MIDI out from LCC 7.

8.1.10 works well on Snow 10.6.8 and has LCB widgets but no FFI, which makes me sad. I was able to back-port some newer widgets, and started to wonder if it would be possible to recompile just the 'toolchain' LCB stuff in order to back-port the FFI stuff to work on 8.x, but it's probably too tied to changes in the engine to be that easy? Much of LCB is built as LCB modules (the plan at one point was to bootstrap the entire IDE and Engines to be built with 'Infinite Livecodes' or some such lofty stretchy goal), so perhaps at some point I'll see if I can use Extension Builder to recompile any of the newer FFI language modules to possibly work on v8 (and therefore Snow Leo).

Decker HTML builds run quite well on SnowLeo in some community built modern-is web based browser that people still running Snow have built. Emscripten HTML5 OXT at least tries to run on some of these browsers too but it's painful. I was thinking Electron wrapper, but Electron didn't exist until macOS 10.10.x.

It would be good to compile a list of what got dropped or adopted in which version. I had assumed that 32bit building had been dropped with 9.0 alpha/betas but now we know that stayed in until 9.6.1.

[foxtrot47]

That said, because I'm being forced to clean out my garage and therefore go through the various older computer rigs I have out there, the last week or so I have been playing around on those boxes (after getting some up and running again) with LCC 6.6.5,6.6.7,7.x,and 8.1.5 on SnowLeo macOS 10.6.8. Why? Because there are retro-computing people out there (including me) that still like to run stuff on old systems like PowerPC. I still have a MDD G4 that works better then ever, maxed to 1.5GB RAM and SSD (but no G5 to test PPC64...was there ever even a PPC64 LCC build?)

I can't answer your question about a PPC64 LCC build, but I do have an iMac G5 that's all yours (Free) just to further your ambitions. That is, if you're okay with "adding" to the garage you just cleaned out!

Private message me if you're interested and I'll ship. Here's the specs: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac ... 7_als.html

[OpenXTalkPaul]

That said, because I'm being forced to clean out my garage and therefore go through the various older computer rigs I have out there, the last week or so I have been playing around on those boxes (after getting some up and running again) with LCC 6.6.5,6.6.7,7.x,and 8.1.5 on SnowLeo macOS 10.6.8. Why? Because there are retro-computing people out there (including me) that still like to run stuff on old systems like PowerPC. I still have a MDD G4 that works better then ever, maxed to 1.5GB RAM and SSD (but no G5 to test PPC64...was there ever even a PPC64 LCC build?)

I can't answer your question about a PPC64 LCC build, but I do have an iMac G5 that's all yours (Free) just to further your ambitions. That is, if you're okay with "adding" to the garage you just cleaned out!

Private message me if you're interested and I'll ship. Here's the specs: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac ... 7_als.html

Thanks for the offer, and it probably would be fun to try to max out a Dual G5 tower and test it's limits, but for OpenXTalk it's much more of a concerned for me to compile support for certain present day hardware (ARM64 / AppleSilicon), and I really don't want to fill my garage back up, It's not even entirely cleaned out as it is, but I can actually use it as a garage now, like for a car! ...or maybe start a real garage band with actual people, lol.

I was more or less thinking out loud, I don't think that there was ever a PPC64 build done but I could be wrong. There wasn't a Intel 64bit build until LC CE 8 (32/64 universal) for Mac, and not until LC CE 9.x for a Win64 engine.

Anyway LC Community 8.x runs quite well on the old LGA775 Snow Leopard hack (SSD upgrade really helps a lot). There are several retro-use advantages to some of those older versions (like a PPC Standalone engine) and so I may, someday, try to back port (or maybe 'forward port'?) the relevant things from LC CE past and OXT to make this theoretical 'OXT Retro'. LC CE 8.x engines did support widgets but did not have a useable Foreign Function Interface... still there were some nice widget enhancements made for 8, including color SVG graphics widget.

[foxtrot47]

...or maybe start a real garage band with actual people, lol.

I managed to clock about 50 hours in Rocksmith, let my guitar sit for a few years, then gave the lot to my nephews. I'll let you know if they fare any better