11–20 of 100 posts
I ran sparc32/64 suns and vaxen under BSD derived os just fine. Symbolic expansion of $arch in nfs mounted filestores to maintain a local/bin path.. no biggie Sorry I'm not sure I buy this line of reasoning.
There's something to be said about why those architectures, plus many others, died in favor of an x86 monoculture.
Implied in this: The expectation to copy binaries between machines and having them work. Less of an issue if you compile from source.
I ran sparc32/64 suns and vaxen under BSD derived os just fine. Symbolic expansion of $arch in nfs mounted filestores to maintain a local/bin path.. no biggie Sorry I'm not sure I buy this line of reasoning.
There's something to be said about why those architectures, plus many others, died in favor of an x86 monoculture.
I think that has a lot more to do with the economics around Linux, Windows, and macOS on commodity amd64 hardware becoming “good enough” to replace servers and workstations running on other, more expensive, architectures.
Not having to deal with architecture porting issues is just gravy at that point.
Implied in this: The expectation to copy binaries between machines and having them work. Less of an issue if you compile from source.
It's a simple statement of fact, but it does need to be pointed out when ARM or RISC is often hyped. Many forget that that most non-x86's are system-on-chips, with very different components on them to make each a unique hardware platform on its own for system developers (and thus a huge pain in the butt) compared to the more "standardised" x86-64 hardware available from Intel and AMD. I fear that unless some kind of…
The author is confused. The points they make are not about x86 vs. non-x86, they're instead about mixing different architectures. Yes, if you write a program and deploy it on three machines, and they all have different pointer sizes, endianness, and executable formats (PE, ELF, etc.) then, yes that can suck. If this article was written 10 years ago, more people would probably agree. But nowadays, its perfectly possib…
Implied in this: The expectation to copy binaries between machines and having them work. Less of an issue if you compile from source.
Compiling from source is easier said than done for many big open source projects. In practice, they compile only with specific versions of GCC, CMake and libc.