| [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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| A big step forward in cross-platform computing : Comment 38 of 39 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 21-Sep-2004 08:11 GMT | In reply to Comment 34 (Ben Hern):
"Over several years intent has been developed by Tao's engineering team for use in connected devices in home and mobile networks. The emphasis has been on creating an open, comprehensive, customizable, compact, fast and binary portable multimedia solution incorporating advanced capability in streaming audio and video. At its heart is Tao's Sun Authorized Virtual Machine and libraries. Today, the software is being deployed in a broad range of markets including digital games, home networking, digital television, automotive and phones."
Tao's VM runs atop the Elate (well, VP) 'VM,' or you can run javac (IIRC) or whatnot to blow it straight into 'compiled'/translated bytecode. There may have been some various magic in terms of what initiates what, but that's basically it... one interpreter-alike (which may indeed have translated before execution rather than interpreting or JIT-ing, passing Sun's compliance suite is orthogonal to *how* the implementation makes compliance happen), one compiler/translator-alike. Since the VP is a 'middle ground,' the compilation/translation step doesn't take very long, probably gets cached, etc, etc.
I hate to just drop a link to www.funroll-loops.org and run, but I've been through like three drafts of other replies, and they all turn to rant. There's a place for everything, and it's my humble opinion that extremely streamlined instruction-set abstraction probably does belong on many desks. Especially if they'll mostly be used to play Solitaire yet be tied to Windows for it. (Well, rant: It can go either way, you can build your abstraction into an 'environment' unto itself: Elate/Intent and Java to various extents -- or you can build an abstraction 'tailored' to your OS: .NET [though that tailoring is more in the legal realm than anything else], or chances are anything cool anyone does with TenDRA will target either Linux or BSD ABIs, albeit ones that handle the abstracted calling convention*... One approach gets you a write-once-run-anywhere platform that 'becomes' the OS from the developer's perspective, the other makes the existing OS become a write-once-run-anywhere platform.)**
*If that makes sense. In other words, I'm betting anything cool that *would* ever be done with TenDRA wouldn't immediately include the equivalent of the Java standard library or the whole Elate kernel/OS and Intent graphic/media library business... there'd just be the 'translator' itself, which would, er, translate calls transparently. Which, er, is sort of the sane, "monolithic" approach, but demands a portable kernel to begin with (which Linux/BSD are, and XP... remains a clusterf*ck about, to the extent that Microsoft do get an ease with .NET by, one assumes, making the one .NET VM project build-time 'portable' across the similar-API'd Windows Family of Operating Systems... but they've still gone through the trouble to reimplement features 'within' their environment, because they need to eventually use it to replace and subsume everything irreparable in their existing OSes. WTFOMGBBQ)
**So er, yeah, Microsoft are screwing up to the extent that .NET has to be something of an "OS" unto itself because their actual OS ain't no good. When, of course, "just" translating abstract bytecode calling the existing native APIs without creating a layer of here's-some-new-sh*t-for-everyone-to-port-to insulation from them would actually give them an excuse for lock-in/customer retention that doesn't rely on vague dangling legal axes.
So much for this post's coherency. Anyhow, the benefit of all this stuff is *supposed* to be that, even if it costs money, that money buys you freedom, without having to *always* take the tradeoff of "Watching sh*t scroll by for hours." (Hint: Yeah, you already don't have to, in Linux/x86-land. But we're seeing how much fun Flash on Linux/PPC is, right?) |
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List of all comments to this article (continued) |
| Comment 39 | Joe "Floid" Kanowitz | | 21-Sep-2004 08:24 GMT |
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