IRAF on MacOS X / Intel – "Pretty easy port"
June 14th, 2005 by admin
So, I exchange a couple of emails with Mike Fitzpatrick over at NOAO. He seems to think supporting the new “MacTel” machines shouldn’t be too hard.
Assuming there’s wide community interest… I don’t really see a problem with the Intel switch from the IRAF side.. It would have to be a new architecture to support native compilation (I have my doubts about the performance/reliability of Rosetta running PPC IRAF binaries), but it shouldn’t be a difficult port since we don’t use Apple-specific frameworks.
Similarly, he later says that they’ll worry about it when they have an Intel/Mac machine, but that they’re current concerns are with getting it to compile using GCC 4.0 on Tiger, and if they should stick with f2c or go to g77.
My guess is that once it compiles on gcc 4, getting it to compile on Intel shouldn’t be too hard. Let’s hope there just isn’t too long a delay, as I’m sure someone will email me the day the first MacTel machine arrives asking if IRAF will run on it.
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