I think Oleg has summarized and expressed better many of the things I was trying to say. A single binary on a least common denominator platform is a legacy binary. It runs unoptimized on other platforms. Though the term Win precedes these Microsoft operatig systems, that's a brand. W2K, WinXP etc. arecompletely different OS's with lose backward compatibility. The right way to do this would be to have different code bases and different distributions for W2K and WinXP. This may grow worse with Vista. That is unfortunate, but that is how Microsoft OS's are.
Thanks, Rana On 8/9/06, Oleg Khaschansky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
BTW what are the real advantages of having one binary? I'd say that having separate binaries is more flexible solution in general: 1. Don't care about performance degradation due to runtime checks. 2. Easy to port to new platforms by expanding #define's. 3. Possibility to link statically against platform-specific libraries. 4. Easy to code platform-specific calls without additional code for dynamic invocations (calling by name, etc.). 5. Possibility of implementing functionality for one particular platform (e.g., we have something on XP for free and need to do a hard work enabling it on 2K), easy platform specific performance tuning. 6. Usage of platform-specific definitions won't break the build on other platforms. And the cost of having one binary rises with the number of differences in the API used. IMO, the best solution is to switch to the separate binary when the amount of platform-specific code becomes not neglible, say 1% :) Or the workload of this code (is it the right word?) becomes reasonably high, resulting in significant performance degradation due to runtime checks. > >> So the question is: should we aim to have a single binary that works on > >> W2K PIII /and/ WinXP IPF ? Hmm, are PIII and IPF binary compatible? At least, there are a lot of compile-time optimizations specific to IPF, if I am not missing something... thanks, Oleg > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Terms of use : http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/mailing.html > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Terms of use : http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/mailing.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
