>>> Assuming you run i386 Linux. I suspect Bayard, for example, >>> would disagree with you. :-)
Well, I'm not a surly curmudgeon, even though I'm retiring Friday, but the fact is that I've long been an advocate of "general-think" - 10 years ago (literally - all during 1992), I was involved in the roll-out of the Alpha architecture. The primary audience for Alpha was originally VMS (because they needed/wanted to scale onto much "bigger" hardware), but once the decision was taken to port DEC OSF/1 to Alpha, and we worked out a deal with Microsoft to port Windows NT to Alpha, it became an interesting task to get people to stop saying "VMS" when they meant "the operating system", and to realize that some OS' did things slightly differently from others in some respects, but in others, there were aspects of the Alpha program that were operating system-independent. Since then, and more recently with Linux, I've tried to champion the concept/mindset that not everything is i386 (or IA32), that there are other architectures that it's been/being ported to, and some of them are 32 bit and some are 64 bit (and, admittedly, there is more than one 64 bit architecture to which it's been ported that is still shipping). Hopefully, this should make folks craft their source code so that ints are ints and pointers are pointers and neither one is necessarily 32 bits and shouldn't be assumed to be. (Yes, there are some other details, but you get the idea). Sadly, the fellow who wrote the ia32 emulator for Alpha has left the company (and the group that 'owned' it, which was mostly sold to Intel), so I can't vouch for how viable that emulator is these days. But, it's illustrative of the point that we need to try to remain sensitive to the needs of all architectures whenever possible. And, that's without getting into specific details about the differences in various implementations of each architecture. (e.g. AMD vs. Piv, EV4 vs. EV45 vs. EV5 vs. EV56 vs. EV6, etc.). Just my 20 millidollars' worth, and this, like everything else I spew from this address, is solely my personal opinion and not that of my current employer. Bayard ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Bayard R. Coolidge N1HO DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed are Hewlett-Packard Company solely those of the author, and not Nashua, New Hampshire, USA those of the Hewlett-Packard Company, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (DEC '77-'98,CPQ '98-'02) or any other entity. "Brake for Moose - It could save your life" - N.H. Fish & Game Dept. -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS/CC d+ s:+ a++ C+++$ UO++$L++>$ P L++>$ E-@ W+ N++ o- K? w--- O? M? V-- PS+ PE+ Y+ PGP- t++ 5? X? R* tv b++ DI+++ D? G e++ h-- r++ y? UF++ -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK----- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
