Just thought I'd continue the Archicad 64-bit on Mac discussion in the right thread, and direct your attention to a couple of interesting pieces by John Gruber. They put things in perspective, and perhaps let you understand better the hurdles involved and the time needed to make this transition for a big program like Archicad.
This one from 2008, about Adobe's switch to Cocoa and 64bits on the Mac.
This one about iTunes (which is still Carbon).
Also, I find
this piece by Drew McCormack about Apple's open-sourcing of the Grand Central Dispatch thread-management technology interesting.
It seems that Apple wants to leverage their 'blocks' extension to the C language (that was also discussed in
John Siracusa's Snow Leopard review).
This move by Apple is especially interesting for a cross-platform developer like Graphisoft, because if more globally accepted, it would make life easier. It is clear that Archicad gains very much when you multi-thread the program, and this technique is aimed at making this easier. At least, Apple's move will force other players (read Microsoft) to do something!
I doubt that we'll see any benefits from this in the near future, though. Perhaps within five years or so?
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1
