Porting to Intel

After working on the Developer Transition Kit for a few days, I found that porting to Intel isn't always quick & painless. If you have a Cocoa application which uses no low-level APIs, doesn't deal with binary files, and doesn't use Altivec accelleration, the port may be quick & easy, but everyone else will probably run into some issues.

In my case, I have to read & write binary files with a complex structure. Although it's easy to detect which byte order the file uses, I'm still finding many places where I have to do byte swapping. Another common problem to watch out for is treating 4-byte values as a long int, such as a creator/file type constant or IP address.

For anyone else porting code, use this forum thread to share your porting tips or ask for advice.