I came across two good blog posts from Mac software developers on the complex issues involved in porting existing, large Mac applications to run natively on Intel (x86) based Macs. One is from Scott Byer who works on Photoshop at Adobe:
…That leaves doing the work for real – taking the whole application over into XCode and recompiling as a Universal Binary. And that’s no small task…
Rick Schaut over at the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft writes:
…Whether we had gone through the pain of porting to XCode/GCC in some earlier release of our products, we’d have still had to go through this pain. The time spent doing this work then would have to have come from the features that we were, instead, adding to our programs. Arguing that we should have, somehow, absorbed this pain earlier really has little bearing on the nature and extent of the pain…