On Saturday 04 June 2005 03:32 am, Justin The Cynical wrote:
> It would break a lot of software, but I'm not sure how hard it would be
> to switch. As long as the apps were written according to the spec for
> C+, carbon, coca, whatever, recompiling for x86 generally wouldn't be
> too hard (look at all the open source projects that will work on
> multiple platforms), and since Darwin already has been ported to x86...
Carbon, which is the compatibility layer that allowed for transitional "fat
binary" apps that could be used in both MacOS 9 and MacOS X, would not make
the transition gracefully. However, apps coded in Objective C and those coded
in open-spec languages like C, C++, etc. would make the leap gracefully.
Look at Debian Linux. They are pulling back from supporting the myriad of
architectures they used to with the 3.1 "Sarge" release, but the 3.0 "Woody"
release supported all these architectures:
* Alpha
* ARM
* HP PA-RISC
* Intel x86
* Intel IA-64
* Motorola 680x0
* MIPS
* MIPS (DEC)
* PowerPC
* IBM S/390
* SPARC
And by "supported architectures" they don't mean just the kernel, they mean
all the apps.
FreeBSD has become a big part of Darwin which is the BSD UNIX derived basic OS
under the hood of MacOS X. Jordan Hubbard, who was a major developer of
FreeBSD, was lured away to Apple and is now making sure that Darwin maintains
compatibility with FreeBSD.
FreeBSD currently supports these architectures: x86, AMD64, Alpha, IA64,
UltraSPARC and PC98. Theoretically it also supports PowerPC now but the
FreeBSD guys haven't released the PPC version.
NetBSD is the current reigning champ of compatibility. Suffice it to say that
there are too many architectures to mention in this email. However, if you
are curious, here's a URL.
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/
Once you get away from the proprietary OS scene, you find that platform
agnosticism is not merely a good idea, it's a rule. The free UNIX-like OSes
are totally platform independent. There are recompiling issues like "Big
Endian and Little Endian" incompatibilities (Link:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~verts/cs32/endian.html ) but once you get past that
you are on the way to chip friendly bliss.
Hope this helps,
Michelle
PS: I don't think this is going to happen. I think that Steve is just playing
his brand of hardball with IBM, and is also throwing the Mac rumor sites "the
mother of all misdirections" to keep them off the story of what he will
actually announce at WWDC.
--
Michelle Klein-Hass
Box 2273, Van Nuys, CA 91404-2273
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