🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <00405@sarek.UUCP> gsarff@sarek.UUCP (Gary Sarff) writes:
>There seem to be two different camps here.  I have seen numerous postings in
>this group saying "architecture/machine xxx (sparc,mips,...) will do better,
>look at all the applications/software base we have for the xxx architecture."
>The poster above, says porting is nothing more than recompiling.  We can't
>have it both ways.
Porting is not much more then recompileing when the new system has the same
data order, sizes and padding requirments (or if you wrote correct code that
doesn't make assumptions about that stuff), and when the *exact* same (or
at least upwardly compatable) OS is running.  It is easy to move code from
a Sun3 to a Sun4 (allowing for padding diffrences) because they are both the
same mix of SysV and BSD, both have RPC, both have XDR, both use the same
extenions to make, both have the same lightweight process lib, both have the
same shared libs, &c &c...
However going from a SPARCStarion 1 to a DECStation 3000 you have to deal
with diffrences between SunOS & Ultrix.  If it was a SunView program you have
to re-write it to use X (even with the XView toolkit it's far harder then a
re-compile).
-- 
           stripes@eng.umd.edu          "Security for Unix is like
      Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The          Mutitasking for MS-DOS"
      "The dyslexic porgramer"                  - Kevin Lockwood
"Don't try to change C into some nice, safe, portable programming language
 with all sharp edges removed, pick another language."  - John Limpert