I was trying to resist replying to this. Oh well. The nice thing about C is that it is low level. The problem with C is that it is low level. This is relevant to this discussion because unlike Java if you compile C to byte code it does not mean that the program can work on any and every architecture. There are even some problems with Java, but it does work everyware most of the time.
I doubt that you could define a byte code that would be both 32 bit and 64 bit. Pointer arithmetic is nasty. The bottom line is that even if you compile C to byte code you would need to test the program on every architecture that you plan to support. If you are going to do that you might as well just compile to native instructions. But if you are going to do that you don't need byte code. -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Adam Thornton Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 6:20 PM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: ELF Binaries and Linux on z/Series On Sep 27, 2005, at 7:19 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote: > Sounds like Linux needs an intermediate "byte-code" format, so you > could > use gcc to compile to this byte-code and then have gcc on the > destination machine compile the byte-code in to it's natural machine > code. > > Heh, just a random thought... GCC already basically does that; its internal representation (to which the various languages in the GCC suite compile) is, I think, architecture independent. But the problem is still that you need to compile it to native instructions on the target architecture (or cross-compile it). Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
