🚀 go-pugleaf

uesu03@giac1.oscs.montana.edu (Lou Glassy) writes:

> Is the idea of running code on virtual machines dead?
> Found a couple of old books yesterday on the p-System and 
> MINT.  
> 
> The possibility of taking my binary from machine to machine,
> (with possibly different physical architectures), and having
> it run without dinking, is an intriguing one.
> 
> Is any work going on in this area?  Or does performance pay
> more than portability?
> 
Firstly, there is a commercial package called "Soft-PC" which runs on
Macintoshes and emulates a PC.  Also, isn't this one of the basic
ideas of Windows NT?  Since NT is supposed to be platform independent,
if you are running on an Alpha and then start-up an application compiled
for the Intel x86 family, won't NT really startup an x86 emulator and
run the application inside of that?

I guess that these aren't really p-code systems.  But then again, if
you run the same p-code on all platforms, then all systems will suffer
a performance hit, while if you compile it for one system and run under
emulators on all others, then at least the one system running native
code will have good performance while the others take the hit.

Also, I read recently (within the last 6 months) in some trade journal
(Info-world, I think) that Microsoft is writing some windows application
(I think it was a database) in p-code for some reason.  (I know that
this last bit sounds really, really hazy, but I do know that I saw
the headline with something like "Microsoft brings back P-Code" (there
I go being vague again...:)).

-Richard Walter
richardw@parallan.com