Xcode and 64 bit apps on Leopard? A small step still remains…
Although Xcode is the only real world 64-bit application on Leopard, it is not yet fully dedicated to support the 64-bit applications on 100%. It has still major defects using debugger at 64-bit applications. I tried to make one my application 64-bit, but the debugger stopped me from doing it so, and I switched back to 32-bits during the development. However, I plan to get back to 64-bits later, I’m not giving up though… [-;
This is how debugging should look like
At first, I started wandering where did my objective-c variables go. I thought I hadn’t have switched on some build variable, so I was looking for some magic check box, but without any luck. After some searching, and experimenting, I found that when the application was running at 32-bit mode, everything was just fine, but when I switched back to 64-bit mode, all the variables went away. At the same time, I also found that gdb doesn’t allow me to execute any objective-c methods. This might be the reason why no variables were shown. This also sucks, since I call obj-c variables quite often as I need to display value of some object, or test something.
And this is how it is in 64-bits.
I don’t know what is the cause of this. It is apparently some change in the obj-c runtime system that broke the things. I don’t even know whether this worked at previous Xcode version (I used 3.1 now), so it might be just a bug, but quite annoying.
Leopard is a good start on the 64-bits way, but Apple has still long way to go if they want us to use and develop 64-bits as the main job. I hope that Snow Leopard will continue the current effort in computing to bring the real 64-bit environment.
