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> guarantee that you can unrar a file in 20 years with minimal work Does this take into account a potential change in the predominant architecture? I.e., we mo

• mmastrac 8y ago
  As the code is compiled to a well-specified, small VM it should only be a matter of writing the VM in whatever language is already available for that particular platform/architecture. You can also choose to write the VM in raw assembly. While this isn't ideal, the VM itself is mainly just straightforward register operations and should map trivially to any hardware that has bit operations and hardware 32-bit multiply/divide. If it comes down to it, you can implement the VM itself on bare metal, but you'll need to do some work implementing things like a filesystem (not terribly hard to get a basic, non-scalable one up-and-running). I suppose there's an assumption that the platform provides 32-bit integers, but I _think_ that's a safe assumption.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    This is the genesis of P-Code design for Pascal. Originally Wirth only planned to use it for bootstrapping purposes, then UCSD decided to make a whole platform on top of it.