While our focus at Phoronix is on testing hardware under Linux, we remain friendly and interested in other BSD and UNIX operating systems too, including Mac OS X. With the launch of Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' we have been particularly interested in it considering the technological advancements that have been made in this update thanks to their large focus on improving the performance of Mac OS X. With that said, we have spent all week working on a grand Mac OS X benchmarking showdown by comparing the performance of the retail build of Mac OS X 10.6.0 to the earlier Mac OS X 10.5.8 through a number of different quantitative tests. We firmly believe that as of right now these are the most detailed desktop performance numbers available concerning Snow Leopard, but we already have more figures on the way. We have performance numbers from not just one Mac computer, but two different setups. Here's to the first 60+ tests we ran!
The stated goals for Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' have been on improving performance, efficiency, and lowering the overall memory footprint of this operating system. With these performance tuning efforts, Apple has dropped support for the older PowerPC-based Apple computers and are now focusing strictly on Intel-based hardware and optimizing for x86_64-capable processors. Snow Leopard brings full 64-bit support both in the kernel and for their user-space applications, except for a few that are not yet ported like iTunes and QuickTime. The 64-bit addressing support alone should yield a nice performance boost, but greater performance gains in Mac OS X 10.6 can to a large extent be attributed to Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) and OpenCL. Rogues delight mac os.
Apple's Grand Central Dispatch is designed to deliver better desktop performance through improving parallel programming on Mac OS X with multi-core processors by making it easier on developers and on the operating system by handling the thread management and ensuring all CPU jobs are distributed across the available computing cores. Xcode in Mac OS X 10.6 has also received more work to LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) and Clang, as an alternative to the GNU Compiler Collection.
We have talked about OpenCL before as its an industry standard and Apple is one of the large companies involved in its creation, but besides appearing in a NVIDIA Linux driver, Mac OS X 10.6 will be one of the first places to find the Open Computing Language in action. The specifications to OpenCL 1.0 were released last year and the graphics card manufacturers in particular have been busy working on implementing this support within their drivers to exploit their massively powerful capabilities. However, this OpenCL support on Mac OS X is only available to those with an ATI/AMD or NVIDIA graphics processor and not the Mac computers with Intel integrated graphics.
Beyond overhauling the performance of Mac OS X when at the desktop, Snow Leopard is also much faster at starting up and shutting down. Apple has been claiming this for a while and even to the magnitude of waking up twice as fast and nearly the same speed in shutting down, and we have confirmed it in our tests. When installed, Mac OS X 10.6 also takes up at least 7GB less space than did Mac OS X 10.5.
While what we are looking at is strictly the Mac OS X performance, Snow Leopard does bring some other refinements too like support for the Microsoft Exchange Server, improvements to its Time Machine software, a more advanced Finder, QuickTime X, the CUPS 1.4 printing server, changes to the Stacks and Dock icons, and other alterations.
Well, that is our synopsis on the technology changes to be found in Mac OS X 10.6. Of course, this is quite brief since we are just focused on the numbers, but for more information on Snow Leopard check out the Apple Developer Connection and their technology page. Now let's get to some animal benchmarking!
Meld for OSX
Download OSX dmg file
- Version 3.21.0 (r2) Latest (Catalina & Mojave)
- Version 3.19.2 (r5) (Mojave & High Sierra)
- Version 3.19.2 (r3) (Mojave & High Sierra)
- Version 3.19.0 (r1) (Previous stable version - High Sierra)
- Version 3.16.0 (r1) (Not for High Sierra)
- Version 3.15.4 (r2) (Not for High Sierra)
- Version 3.15.2 (r2) (Not for High Sierra)
- Version 3.13.4 (Not for High Sierra)
- Version 1.8 (Not for High Sierra)
~/.gitconfig
and add the following linesMech@mor Showdown Mac Os Pro
Why Meld for Mac/OSX and not Macports/Homebrew
- Retina support (check the screenshot!)
- Latest 3.x series
- No hassle install (drag/drop like any other app)
- Integrates with OSX menu
Supports standard OSX shortcuts (cmd-c/cmd-v instead of ctrl)(Merged to upstream)- Note: Homebrew now installs Meld for OSX
Screenshot
![Mech@mor showdown mac os catalina Mech@mor showdown mac os catalina](https://www.50gameslike.com/sites/default/files/styles/screen_height/public/images/b/battletech_flashpoint/battletech_flashpoint_logo.jpg)
Special Thanks
- To Kai Willadsen http://meldmerge.org/ for creating Meld.
- To the Gnome project https://www.gnome.org/
- To Alex Kras whose web page (How To Run Meld on Mac OS X Yosemite Without Homebrew, MacPorts, or Think) served as my reference for tracking Meld for OSX usage and issues when I had absolutely no time to maintain this.
TODO
- Get rid of the Meld wrapper shell script (this should get rid of all the wrappers needed to run Meld from the terminal)
- Support Meld localizations (currently only English works)
Suggestions / Issues
Contribute to Meld for OSX
- Head to https://github.com/yousseb/meld
- Fork the repository and clone your fork locally.
- Follow the build instructions in https://github.com/yousseb/meld/blob/master/osx/README.md to generate your own dmg.
- Do your magic, commit and push to your fork.
- Create a pull request.
Not Accepting Donations
What is Meld?
![Mac os download Mac os download](https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvNzEyMTk1LzQzMTYxNjMucG5n/original/i3p8vB.png)
Features
- Two- and three-way comparison of files and directories
- File comparisons update as you type
- Auto-merge mode and actions on change blocks help make merges easier
- Visualisations make it easier to compare your files
- Supports Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, Subversion, etc.
- …and more
Mech@mor Showdown Mac Os Catalina
In depth features
File comparison
- Edit files in-place, and your comparison updates on-the-fly
- Perform two- and three-way diffs and merges
- Easily navigate between differences and conflicts
- Visualise global and local differences with insertions, changes and conflicts marked
- Use the built-in regex text filtering to ignore uninteresting differences
- Syntax highlighting
Directory comparison
Mac Os Versions
- Compare two or three directories file-by-file, showing new, missing, and altered files
- Directly open file comparisons of any conflicting or differing files
- Filter out files or directories to avoid seeing spurious differences
- Simple file management is also available
Version control
- Meld supports many version control systems, including Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and SVN
- Launch file comparisons to check what changes were made, before you commit
- View file versioning statuses
- Simple version control actions are also available (i.e., commit/update/add/remove/delete files)
Merge mode (in development)
- Automatically merge two files using a common ancestor
- Mark and display the base version of all conflicting changes in the middle pane
- Visualise and merge independent modifications of the same file
- Lock down read-only merge bases to avoid mistakes
- Command line interface for easy integration with existing tools, including git mergetool