On 8/27/07, Duane Ryan <bailey.d.r@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > ...Though isn't haiku an operating system that works on ppc AND x86? > Certainly it would help the ppc side if you could compile once, > distribute everywhere. BeOS was available for PPC and x86 (and required apps to be built separately for each), but Haiku is primarily focusing on x86. With Apple moving to x86, the PPC line is disappearing from the desktop scene and will become increasingly rare. That's not to say that a PPC version won't be made, only that a feature like this is probably out of the scope of the project at the moment. On 8/26/07, Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The kernel only uses C interfaces, and drivers using C++ should link > against libgcc.a directly. > So the kernel would only eventually suffer from differences in > alignment and padding in structures. > > Bye, > Axel. Mentioning differences with alignment in structures reminded me of an article I found a while back while doing some development under QNX. http://www.qnx.com/developers/articles/article_302_2.html Basically, it uses "opaque pointers" to add an abstraction layer to defined structures so that an app that uses a structure defined in a library will still work if the structure is redefined, rearranged, or resized. I don't know enough about the kernel to know if this would help in the alignment/padding issue or if it would require a lot of changes in other code, but the discussion reminded me of it so I figured I'd at least mention it.