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Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Posted Mar 2, 2021 20:09 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with by smcv
Parent article: Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

And you also have the technical issues:

The Foobar9000 does some things that probably made sense at the time (segmented pointers, sign-magnitude integers, the IA64 NaT bit, putting something interesting at address 0, etc.), but my code is sufficiently low-level (e.g. a GCC or LLVM backend) that dealing with those things is actually painful and I don't feel like bothering.

The Foobar9000 does not have (an MMU/software programmable interrupts/an FPU/etc.) and I'm not willing to (replace all calls to fork() with vfork()/insert gratuitous sched_yield()s everywhere/avoid using floats/etc.).

I've never heard of anyone running any sort of software on a Foobar9000 without using FooCorp's proprietary non-Unix operating system, and I'm not porting my software to that because I would basically have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

I've never heard of anyone running any sort of "real" operating system on a Foobar9000 at all (e.g. because it was purpose-built to do exactly one thing, like the Apollo Guidance Computer), and my code is obviously incapable of running on the bare metal.


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Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Posted Mar 3, 2021 10:08 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Or, for the nastiest of the technical issues, a cheap thing to do on modern hardware happens to be really expensive on the Foobar9000 (context switching, floating point addition, integer multiplication/division etc), and you're reliant on it being cheap. So your install behaves just fine, but users on the Foobar9000 complain that your software is a disaster, and you don't understand why.


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