According to MrJoltCola: > At 06:24 PM 4/6/2005, Chip Salzenberg wrote: > > * What platforms are required for release? I'd guess that we'd get > > almost of all of our developers (and users, for that matter) with: > > > > darwin > > linux-x86-gcc3.* > > win32-ms-cl > > You should round that out with 64-bit Sparc.
How many Sparc developers have we got?
I'm not sure, one or two, but I don't count as I'm not active atm, I just commentate. :)
On related questions: Could you unpack for me the status of 32-bitness vs. 64-bitness in the Sparc world? Are all (most of) the chips 64-bit, and for how long? The kernels? The apps?
All of the UltraSparc chips are 64-bit, which makes 64-bit Sparc about a decade
old now, 1995 I think (since early Solaris versions, 2.5 at least). Virtually all of
Sparc/Solaris is 64-bit nowadays, but there are quite a few hobbyists with pre-Ultra
boxes still running out there. Anyway, Solaris supports 32-bit and 64-bit apps.
The kernel is 64-bit. Companies like Oracle are starting to phase out releases
for 32-bit versions of their products. 4 out of the 7 boxes in my office are 64-bit.
All of my customers run big monsters (8-16 cpus with 64-128GB RAM) and
as best I can tell Sun is still ruling the RISC/UNIX world even though the
UltraSparc isn't the fastest per CPU. Its a darn fun chip to program for, though.
However, I think the next big thing is Solaris on Opteron (64-bit) for 2-4 CPU midrange.
I have told Leo and others that I will provide access to Solaris 10 on UltraSparc II and III
processors when I get the time to build a zone on one of my boxes. I'll also probably
make a Sun compiler available. I wish we could get tinderbox back up and running.
I know there is a ton of Linux and OS X out there, but most mission critical apps are
still running on Solaris, HPUX or AIX in my business, though I am seeing a slow
adoption of Redhat Enterprise Linux.
-Melvin
