Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Yeah. I wonder if Vista et al is as portable as NT used to be, like whether 
>> they managed/bothered to maintain that for the most part or not.
> 
>   Keeping portability to diverse architectures costs time and money.
> Having portability is not a great commercial asset in the case of Windows.
> I wouldn't be surprised if they had made the decision of forgetting
> portability a long time ago. It's simply not cost-efficient in this case.

Yeah, that's what I wondered. On the other hand, once it's done, it's not 
*that* hard to maintain, or at least make it easy. The hard part is 
separating out the non-portable parts (into the HAL for example) and then 
not making machine assumptions at the application level (like endian-ness or 
word size). I just wondered if there was some mandate in Microsoft that the 
OS and such are supposed to be kept portable, in case the x86 architecture 
ever gets a serious competitor again.

I.e., they already support x86 and x64, which are sufficiently different 
that you can't really make a lot of assumptions about the machine from the 
two. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the software MS has could be ported 
to other architectures with relative ease, given that not too long ago it 
was designed to run on something with a different architecture and it runs 
on at least two architectures now.

I wouldn't expect it to be simply a recompile, but I'd be surprised if it 
was a *lot* more work than porting the same amount of Linux-based code. 
Especially given their push towards .NET and all that, that's completely 
machine independent.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   My fortune cookie said, "You will soon be
   unable to read this, even at arm's length."

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