Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 22:05:56 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: terry@lambert.org, jehamby@lightside.com, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, root@dihelix.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Quake's out, where's that Linux ELF emulation? Message-ID: <199602290505.WAA10333@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <4632.825559161@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Feb 28, 96 05:59:21 pm
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> Picture, if you will, a UNIX consultant talking to the product manager > for Foobolix at Foonetics, Inc: > > "You say you want to support this product on ``UNIX''? Ah... OK, > go get ahold of some Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, SCO and OSF/1 machines > (plus maybe a SunOS partition for the hold-outs), hire at least 3 > engineers and prepare to spend 3-6 months at it. Oh yeah, you'll > also need to keep the machines around more or less indefinitely > for ongoing support." > > [a strangling noise is heard over the phone] > > "Hello? Are you OK? Yes, I do admit that this is 6 times the effort > for a market perhaps 1/100th the size of Windows.. No, it doesn't make > any sense, I agree. Excuse me? No, I'm afraid that the free UNIX market > isn't in much better shape. There are at least 3 different variants for the > Intel architecture alone, and each has its own distinct ABI." This depends highly on how the application was written in the first place. For apps like Word Perfect, whose ide of a port was to write an assembly-to-C translator and rewrite the parts that touch hardware after running the assembly-only code through the translator, you're right. For the products that I've been involved with, you're wrong (one of them supported over 140 UNIX platforms. I'm not kidding.). I'll admit up front that much DOS programming isn't written portably up front (which explains the amount of time the Windows version then the Windows95 version then the Win32/WinNT version... etc. is takeing to port). I can't help people who shoot themselves in the foot and then wait until they go to port to realize their foot is gone. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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