I am very happy with Mac OS X 64–bit Zend debugger and Zend Studio. It is a perfect combination for the serious PHP developer. However I miss certain features of XDebug, such as a great error reporting.

Some years ago I tried running Zend Debugger with XDebug and it did not go: the server simply refused to start because of PHP initialization error. It was a Zend precaution against third party extensions that may prevent debugging.

Today I decided to try again and I found that it works! The only requirement is that XDebug is loaded...

If you, like me, use Zend Studio on Mac OS X, you know there were no official Zend 64–bit PHP debugger for Mac OS X. Some time ago Zend posted a true universal binary (including 64–bit version!) to the Zend Advisory Team for testing. We tested it there and it works perfectly!

Today I happy to say that Zend released this version for public use. Read the announcement made by Roy Ganor about it.

Finally Zend debugger is available as native 64 bit binary on Mac OS X.

Today Gadi Goldbarg (QA manager for Zend Studio) announced that Zend starts testing 64 bit version. I tested this version and it works great. It even works a little faster than 32 bit version to my taste (no benchmarks though).

The problem with absence of 64 bit debugger was that you had to run PHP command line also in the 32 bit mode ("arch -i386 php", which is trully annoying if you run PHP often from shell. If you do not run PHP in 32 bit mode with old Zend...