On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 09:17, Steve Bell wrote: > Although, that said and done, I'm still getting my head around how so > many linux apps seem to be ported to run in FreeBSD on PPC in next to no > time. That is because there is a difference between the *binary* interface, and the *programming* interface. Linux, BSD, Solaris, Irix, AIX, and friends share a very similar *programming* interface, so functions that have the same name do the same job in the same way across all the operating systems. However, the *binary* interface â how things are actually performed at the bits-and-bytes level â can vary wildly between the different machines. "Porting" is the job of fixing the one or two programming interface differences in a program and getting the *compiler* to recreate the binary :)
> Hmm, though is the case with WINE that there's two layers of > system calls to be translated, first to port WINE from running on X86 to > PPC, then to have software to pretend the PPC is an X86? â -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
