[haiku-development] Re: FatELF on Haiku?

  • From: Konstantinos Margaritis <markos@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 21:02:58 +0200

On Nov 7, 2009, at 8:42 PM, PulkoMandy wrote:
In the past they never hesitated to break things if they felt it would
be better like that. They switched from bebox to mac, from mac to pc,
from metrowerks to gcc (and pe to elf), and probably some other things
i don't know about between releases.
And they didn't introduce any support to migrate from one of them to
another. Even when they had both a ppc and an intel version available,
they never created universal binary or anything similar. People just
knew what their machine was and downloaded the right packages.

OTOH, Apple decided to keep compatibility, when switching from 68k to
ppc, from classic to osX, from ppc to x86 and from x86 to x64. The
result is bigger apps with everything statically linked, an os written
on assembly ending up being mostly emulated on another processor. This
may seem nice at first glance because everything goes smoothly from a
release to another,  But it gives an heavier and slower system.
Microsoft did the same for windows even without switching archs...

Well, I think history has clearly shown who won. Perhaps we should learn
something, esp. when I hear from many people that Haiku should be
closer to MacOS than Linux or Windows wrt packages/bundles. And
don't underestimate compatibility. As for speed, it depends how do you
define it. Macos X is certainly no slouch when it comes to UI latency and
responsiveness. It's actually faster than most Linux Gnome/KDE distros
in many areas. Admitedly It sucks as a server though.

Konstantinos


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