On 1 Jan 2003, Tathagata Banerjee wrote: > On Tue, 2002-12-31 at 20:31, Russell McOrmond wrote: > > > These things 'seem' like 'native' programs, but are just better > > optimized emulations very similar to what you would get running the > > Windows version under the emulators directly. > > oh, okay. but i wonder how then the linux binaries often run > better/faster than the natively compiled windows versions. for instance, > sumeet says ut2003 runs 10-15% faster under linux than it does on > windows, both on his machine.
You just need to remember that 'emulation' is not a dirty word, and that some of these 'emulators' are not actually emulators at all -- but alternative implimentations of the same API's. Back in the late 1980's the Amiga users used to annoy the Macintosh users because the MacOS 'emulators' for the Amiga (and Atari-ST) would run about 10% faster than an equivalantly CPU'd (CPU, speed, RAM - they all ran the Motorola 680xx processors at the time) Macintosh. WINE provides Win32 API's to Windows Applicatins and then does the right thing on the host OS. The implimntation of the code behind the API may be better than what Microsoft provides in their implimentation of the API. This is the same issue for IBM's OS/2 which was another implimentation of the Win32 environment that ran faster than the implimentation provided by Microsoft. I believe WINE is a great thing, partly because it can demonstrate to people that it is possible to impliment Windows in a more efficient manner. Not only does FLOSS out-do Microsoft Windows in native code, but in some cases it out-does Microsoft Windows for Windows code. It may in the near future be the only actively supported environment that will support the current Windows 9x/ME API's. Microsoft has already announced it is stopping support for this API for Office 11 (because it's implimentation of the API was inherantly insecure ;-), and it may not be too long before this API isn't available in future versions of Microsoft Windows itself. In my case, however, I don't have any applications that use it ;-) It doesn't happen often that a FLOSS application is produced for Win32 only that then needs the Win32 API's to run on Linux or BSD. BTW: I am aware of the complaints about TransGaming's business model of keeping contributions back to the community to 'older code'. This is not the first project to do this, and was the model for MySQL until recently as well. It is still the model used by Aladdin Ghostscript. > - t. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen and not a third party. -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/ -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
