🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1249@otc.otca.oz> gregw@otc.otca.oz (Greg Wilkins) writes:
>Even if it is not a new instruction but an integer co-processor, it
>still needs to be included in the ABI.
>
>Without an official yeh or nay on this one, nobody can have confidence in
>Suns commitment to open systems and the ABI.

I don't see how ABI is related to "open systems."

Source level compatibility ought to be enough for anyone.  With the
emergence of, e.g., ANSI C, POSIX.1, and (less desirably) the
X window system, it will be substantially easier to write portable
programs, and these standards are likely to have a far longer viable
life than any ABI.

I see source level standards as being far less likely than ABIs
to kill future innovation.  RISC architectures, and surely the
SPARC, are far from the last word in computer architecture!

How will your ABI relate to the massively parallel machines
that are likely to become increasinbly prevalent?  And yet the
source level standards will still be useful, particularly
as even some of today's programs might conceivably benefit from
parallelizing compilers.
-- 
Mike Haertel <mike@ai.mit.edu>
"Everything there is to know about playing the piano can be taught
 in half an hour, I'm convinced of it." -- Glenn Gould