On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 10:12 +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
quoted text
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:49:20 +0200
> Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 
> > I'm concerned in trying to solve a problem we are facing here, were 
> > students/researchers
> > write code, and soon will be hit by incompatible platforms.
> 
> Encourage them to write their code in something portable, like
> Java, scheme, python, matlab/octave?  If they have to use
> C/C++/Fortran/ etc, they could get used to distribution in
> source?
> 
> The binary compatibility wheel-of-reincarnation is an interesting
> one to watch.  When I was a student and post-grad at Uni, our
> applications, when shared with colleagues, could very well have
> needed to run on any of Vax, 68k, MIPS (32 or 64 bit), SPARC
> (32-bit), ia32, x86 (16-bit: complicated pointers), with a few
> PowerPC and Alpha systems coming in at the end.  So we used
> matlab or handed around source code.  Before that it was
> all-the-world's-a-vax (unless you were in an IBM shop.)  We've all
> been in a peculiar bubble for a few years where "almost everyone"
> has been using ia32, and it has been easy to think that that's all
> there is (except for weirdos), and that therefore binary
> distribution is OK.  I reckon that we're just coming out of that
> mode, and transiting through something less even, probably until
> amd64 completes it's clean-sweep and becomes the "one and only"
> architecture again (to howls of protest from the ARM/embedded
> crowd...)  That'll be a little way off, though...
> 
> [I'm doing a lot of my own new coding in PLT scheme at the
> moment, and having a ball with it.  (lang/drscheme in ports)

I suspect you are not running contemporary 7.0 there:
twinhead# uname -a 
FreeBSD twinhead.rabbitslawn.verizon.net 7.0-RC1 FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 #0: Tue
Jan  1 19:22:56 EST 2008
root@twinhead.rabbitslawn.verizon.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TWINHEAD
i386
twinhead# make install
===>  drscheme-370 is marked as broken: Fails to install (signal 11).
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/lang/drscheme.
twinhead# 

quoted text
> Fast enough for what I'm doing, byte-code, static or JIT compiled,
> and runs everywhere (including Windows and OSX).]
> 
> What would be *really* cool would be the ability to have a JVM or
> LLVM back-end in the kernel, as a first-class peer of the ELF
> loader.  Anyone know if anyone has tried such a thing on *BSD (or
> even Linux, I guess)?

If you have Linux distribution handy, you can look
at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt. At least its Java
incarnation has been around for a while. I have not seen widespread use
of it, but then again, I have not been looking too hard. 

To be fair, compatibility of the JVMs is the story in and of its own,
and most certainly is OT for this list.
quoted text
> 
> Cheers,
> 

-- 
Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko

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