Mac OSX 10.6 compiler: a puzzling experience with 32 vs 64 bit

Question

I have trouble understanding the gcc compiler provided by OSX 10.6 snow leopard, mainly because of my lack of experience with 64 bits environments.

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Answer 1

Apple toolchains support multiple architectures. If you want to create a fat binary that contains x86 and x86_64 code, then you have to pass the parameters -arch i386 -arch x86_64 to gcc. The compiler will compile your code twice for both platforms in one go.

Adding -arch i386 -arch x86_64 to CFLAGS may allow you to compile gmp, mpfr, and whatnot for multiple archs in one go. Building libusb that way worked for me.