On 25 Sep 2010, at 15:40, James E Keenan wrote: > Now, I know that there are some who will snigger at the thought of trying to > test Parrot on a machine that is more than 6 years old. "Just go out and buy > a new laptop, kid51. It'll be sure to have at least 10 times as much memory > as that ancient, battered box."
Hello. I just wanted to add that I've been building the few latest Parrot releases on a 15-year old Sun Sparcstation 5 with even less memory; it works, and I think that is a good thing even if I don't plan to do anything serious with it. <rant style="boring"> Only gamers and supercomputing people really need to get new hardware every year. The rest of the world should try to make more and better use of what is already there, it is the only sustainable long term plan that we have. It is critical that software run on as many platforms as reasonably possible, and I don't mean "as many Linux distros as possible" (a common definition of "portable" these days) or "Windows, Linux and Mac OS X on intel" (another common way to look at it). More so in the case of a virtual machine that is meant to abstract hardware away. There was this "run everywhere" part of the Java motto. From Java 5 on, with more and more effort going into JIT compilation, the portability of the JVM has suffered, to the point where many platforms (some of which I stubbornly insist on using) have simply been left behind. Oh, they focus on performance, Java is an enterprise thing, got it. .NET? Nobody expects the Spa... er, MS to port anything to non-MS platforms. Mono's effort is impressive (so many man-hours spent so wrongly, IMO), but again, mostly limited to Windows-Linux-Mac. Try to get it to run elsewhere. Oh, they focus on supplanting Java, so it's still performance and enterprise. Now, what niche does Parrot want to fill? </rant> > Needless to say, I don't accept that logic -- and not only because "ancient, > battered box" describes the box's owner as well as the box. Heh, I had never looked at it this way :) By the way, I just got a 419 scam email from a (japanese?) guy who seems to have harvested this list's email addresses. Am I the only lucky one who's going to get filthy rich? Regards. -DS _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
