10 ms·

So they translating asm to C?

• acdha 10y ago
  No: NT was written in a portable high level language from the beginning. They had a few platform support ASM blocks but one of the big selling points in the 90s was true API compatibility across x86, PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, etc. In the pre-Linux era that was huge – porting across vendors' different conceptions of Unix was a huge time-sink. DEC built an impressive x86 to Alpha dynamic binary translator but that was their work, not part of NT. See https://web.archive.org/web/20020503172231/http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4494 https://web.archive.org/web/20020503172231/http://www.win200... for more history from that era
  • rbanffy 10y ago
    In the end, the lack of software (on Windows, the vendor would need to recompile the code for all ISAs) was what doomed Windows on PPC for me. Even though it was ridiculously fast, and a nicer experience than MacOS 8, neither Visual Studio nor Outlook were there.