| [Forum] A big step forward in cross-platform computing | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 15-Sep-2004 22:32 GMT by Gary Goldberg | 39 comments
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By Leander Kahney
02:00 AM Sep. 13, 2004 PT
A Silicon Valley startup claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that
allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit.
Transitive Corp. of Los Gatos, California, claims its QuickTransit software allows applications to run "transparently" on multiple
hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes...
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,64914,00.html?tw=wn_6techhead
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List of all comments to this article| Sorted by date, most recent at bottom |
| Comment 1 | Lando | | 15-Sep-2004 23:18 GMT |
| Comment 2 | Andrew Korn | | 15-Sep-2004 23:27 GMT |
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| A big step forward in cross-platform computing : Comment 3 of 39 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 16-Sep-2004 01:11 GMT | In reply to Comment 2 (Andrew Korn):
Isn't Transitive the company that were touting a dymanic translation system under the name "Dynamite" a few years back? It was discussed somewhat around these parts when Intent / AmigaDE were more of a hot topic.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Dynamo research project from HP?
Anyhow, I can believe they peak around '80%,' whatever 80% exactly means (lower numbers are, of course, more plausible). This isn't rocket science, it's just the equivalent of WINE combined with a CPU emulator/translator someone's bothered to optimize. Why wasn't it done before? Probably because it's much less of a pain in the a** to go out and buy hardware.
Meanwhile, it's not like this is a perfect solution or anything. UNIX-to-UNIX is relatively easy (hey, comes free in every BSD), the novelty being, again, whatever this miracle bytecode translator they claim to have... On the other hand, people have been struggling to reimplement the Windows API for years (WINE, PE2LX/Odin), and you'll notice that while they can *demo* it, they sure aren't selling it just yet. OS X poses a similar challenge, as comes to dragging over the whole shebang of Quartz.
Figure this is mostly a way for corporates to migrate off 'dead' platforms (PA-RISC, Alpha, some flavors of #?Sparc... PDP-n?) and less-than-kicking OSes (OSF?) to the de-facto AMD64/[Linux|BSD] standard, while reaping some performance over crappier emulators (assuming reasonably non-hairy code). And that, given some revenue from that, they *should* be able to spit out Windows and Mac support within a reasonable timeframe, but the compatibility lists will be somewhat limited and the modules will be maintainership hell. |
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