🚀 go-pugleaf

We are seeing a very nice flowering of the free Unixes available
(obviously in source).  Linux is now in v.95 and BSD v0.0 have arrived
(both for the 386).  BSD might become available for SPARC, and GNU is
said to be aiming for 386 and SPARC.

My question is: to what extent do these projects care for and ensure
binary compatibility of applications?

I can imagine several directions from which this could be useful.
First, if any of these is to have a ghost of a chance in the
commercial world, they have to adhere to ABIs.  Both the 386 and SPARC
hvae a well-defined ABI.

Apart from the commercial market, I see binary compatibility as being
quite useful "for us" as well.  E.g., many (if not most) hackers would
want a working TeX.  It seems suboptimal for each of us to have to
open up the TeX source distribution and make it from scratch.  Look at
how convenient (e.g.) EmTeX is: you simply unpack the archives and
setup environmental variables and you have a working TeX.

It takes a lot of programs to make up a "comfortable Unix working
environment".  Binary compatibility and the availability of programs
in binary form would reduce the setup cost of getting there.
-- 

Ajay Shah, (213)749-8133, ajayshah@usc.edu