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Except that the "stable ABI" thing doesn't work in practice. Look at all the people who have to throw away perfectly good hardware every time a new Windows ver
by Arizhel 10y ago
Except that the "stable ABI" thing doesn't work in practice. Look at all the people who have to throw away perfectly good hardware every time a new Windows version comes out, because the hardware maker doesn't care about updating their drivers and just tells customers to buy a new version.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoIt works if it's architecturally designed to work. Mainframes and AS/400 does that. On System/38 (AS/400 predecessor), apps compiled down to a microcode against standardized interfaces. These got converted by special compilers to actual hardware. That's why apps written decades ago still run. You also got modern stuff as updates came in. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf OpenVMS gave customers binary translation tools plus let clusters run with multiple, CPU architectures. That migration wasn't as painless but at least happened. Microsoft eventually applied this strategy at application level combined with OpenVMS's cross-language programming in the form of .NET CLR. It can work at much lower level as IBM showed in the 70's or 80's, though.