Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Why is SPARC so slow? Message-ID: <8175@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> Date: 11 Dec 87 15:21:36 GMT References: <1078@quacky.UUCP> <8809@sgi.SGI.COM> <6964@apple.UUCP> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 22 In article <6964@apple.UUCP> bcase@apple.UUCP (Brian Case) writes: | conglomerates. I think the standardization of UNIX is good, but the | standardization of processors is BAD. We should have a way to achieve | processor independence without necessarily transporting source code (and | in fact, I have an idea for this, but can't share it). We must not bet our | future on a given processor! Comments? The concept of portable object code is not new... the "UCSD Pascal P-System" allowed compilers to generate pseudo code from a number of languages, and port the Pcode. Later some Pcode compilers were developed to give the speed of compiled code without passing source code around. Then there was a peekhole optimizer for Pcode, and, as I recall, there was a compatible ADA compiler. I used it, but the name of the vendor has escapes me, hopefully forever. Hope your idea for portable code can do better. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me