This project is aimed at supporting modern open-source software for macOS on PowerPC. It provides a fork of MacPorts with added fixes and improvements for powerpc-apple-darwin, as well as the port tree, tarballs of pre-built packages and other related resources.
A primary focus here is macOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) run natively on Apple PowerPC machines. The reference system now is 10.6.8 (development thread; installable images). 10a190 is retired. Leopard is supported in principle, but testing for it is limited. Tiger is not supported.
Recommended way to install PowerPC Ports on 10.6 PPC:
1. Install bootstrap curl (needed, since Apple-provided one is archaic and cannot support https; installs into `/opt/bootstrap`) or, preferably, bootstrap git (10.6.8-only, includes curl).
2. Install our PowerPC Ports (installed into `/opt/local`).
3. Review config files in `/opt/local/etc/macports` and modify if needed.
Alternatively, build from source, borrowing fixes from here. Ports sources are available as an archive or in this repo.
Check what is available pre-built for 10.6.8 here.
P. S. There is a legacy version for 10a190, but it won’t be updated. Earlier packages targeting 10a190 are here.
This work started in 2022, and most fixes and improvements before the end of 2024 have been merged into MacPorts upstream. However, certain fundamental ones have not been accepted due to resistance from some MacPorts team members. Since 2025 all further development is done in PowerPC Ports repository.
The near-future plan is to completely detach the toolchain from what MacPorts uses. Several steps toward this were taken, more to come.
Contributions from developers are very much welcomed. You may open PRs to PowerPC Ports repo at GitHub. Bug reports are accepted here. There are also discussions.
Everything C/C++ works, including C++23 (with a very few minor exceptions). We use the current releases of libstdc++ (libc++ is at llvm-7 level and largely untested). Fortran is fully supported; recently we added powerpc-apple-darwin implementation for ieee_arithmetic into GCC. Perl, Python, R, Lisp, Ruby, ML, Scheme, Erlang work. Java is partially supported (openjdk8, at the moment headless). OCaml works fine, but only via bytecode.
If you could contribute to fixing Palemoon forks (White Star, Arctic Fox) for macOS PowerPC, please reach out. This is a major issue. Improvements to X server and SDL would be great. OpenJDK needs X11 fixed. And then there are broken LLVM, V8, Go, D and Rust.
If you like what we are doing and find it useful, you may consider supporting it. This is a hobby project, we have no funding.
This project would not be possible without on-going work to support a modern compiler for Darwin PowerPC done by GCC upstream, in particular Iain Sandoe, and contribution by Kirill Korinsky, who designed its implementation for legacy macOS in MacPorts. A lot of work to improve Snow Leopard for PowerPC has been done by EduCovas. Some features used in PowerPC Ports are based on MacStrop project.
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