Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 10:12:09 +1100 From: Andrew Reilly <andrew-freebsd@areilly.bpc-users.org> To: Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> Cc: rgrav <des@des.no>, Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org>, Peter Schuller <peter.schuller@infidyne.com>, Jason Evans <jasone@freebsd.org>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ELF dynamic loader name [was: sbrk(2) broken] Message-ID: <20080108101209.01800eb6@duncan.reilly.home> In-Reply-To: <E1JBmjZ-00047M-05@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il> References: <E1JBmjZ-00047M-05@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:49:20 +0200 Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> wrote: > I'm concerned in trying to solve a problem we are facing here, were > students/researchers > write code, and soon will be hit by incompatible platforms. Encourage them to write their code in something portable, like Java, scheme, python, matlab/octave? If they have to use C/C++/Fortran/ etc, they could get used to distribution in source? The binary compatibility wheel-of-reincarnation is an interesting one to watch. When I was a student and post-grad at Uni, our applications, when shared with colleagues, could very well have needed to run on any of Vax, 68k, MIPS (32 or 64 bit), SPARC (32-bit), ia32, x86 (16-bit: complicated pointers), with a few PowerPC and Alpha systems coming in at the end. So we used matlab or handed around source code. Before that it was all-the-world's-a-vax (unless you were in an IBM shop.) We've all been in a peculiar bubble for a few years where "almost everyone" has been using ia32, and it has been easy to think that that's all there is (except for weirdos), and that therefore binary distribution is OK. I reckon that we're just coming out of that mode, and transiting through something less even, probably until amd64 completes it's clean-sweep and becomes the "one and only" architecture again (to howls of protest from the ARM/embedded crowd...) That'll be a little way off, though... [I'm doing a lot of my own new coding in PLT scheme at the moment, and having a ball with it. (lang/drscheme in ports) Fast enough for what I'm doing, byte-code, static or JIT compiled, and runs everywhere (including Windows and OSX).] What would be *really* cool would be the ability to have a JVM or LLVM back-end in the kernel, as a first-class peer of the ELF loader. Anyone know if anyone has tried such a thing on *BSD (or even Linux, I guess)? Cheers, -- Andrew
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20080108101209.01800eb6>