Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > Yes, by not saving and restoring the x87 "register" stack when switching
> > threads or making operating system calls. You need OS support for that.
>
>   That would be a rather broken OS.

Not if this was part of the OS specification.

For compiler developers, this would be a major change. For most software, it
would be peanuts, compared to all the other stuff that usually needs to be
changed when porting to a different OS: Re-compile, and you have it. The basic
math stuff like sin, cos etc. is part of the C run-time library anyway, which
is basically part of the compiler.

The fact that new Windows versions typically support software compiled for the
previous version is a good marketing strategy, but not a necessity, and
expecting software compiled today to run on the Windows to come in 10 years
would be naive.

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