I suppose this also applied to NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP but I didn’t cross build that much between the m68k and i386…

So let’s start with a 3 way compile…

$ gcc -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 dhrystone.c -o dhrystone
$ file dhrystone
dhrystone: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
dhrystone (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
dhrystone (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
dhrystone (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
$

This builds the single file for all 3 machine types of OS X..

For anyone that cares, this is my quad core box..

$ ./dhrystone
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 83
This machine benchmarks at 6024096 dhrystones/second

Ok, now let’s pull out the PowerPC executable, and run that….

$ lipo -extract ppc7400 dhrystone -output dpc
$ file dpc
dpc: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture
dpc (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
$
$ ./dpc
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 214
This machine benchmarks at 2336448 dhrystones/second
$

Which isn’t too bad, seeing the emulator runs at 1/3rd speed of the native exe.. It’s no wonder that IBM bought transitive, and shut them down. This kind of technology would make it far too easy for everyone to move away from expensive CPUs…!

Now let’s extract the 32bit i386 exe.

$ lipo -extract i386 dhrystone -output di3

Nothing to really see here.

And for the final part, let’s combine the extracted PPC & i386 executables.

$ lipo di3 dpc -create -output dip
$ file dip
dip: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
dip (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
dip (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc

And there we have it.. Using this I guess I can try to find versions of Qemu that will hopefully cross build on my machine that I can stitch together so that some platforms (PPC) have *SOMETHING* to run at least…..

Or maybe it’ll help someone at least make a stub ‘we are sorry, nothing to see here’ vs an exe error.