3 ms·

Like Android.

• pjc50 7y ago
  Or Transmeta. Or even WebAssembly. It's an interesting trick but only useful if you demand a very high level of binary portability.
  • pjmlp 7y ago
    Or Burroughs, Xerox PARC mainframes, IBM mainframes language environments, UCSD Pascal, Lilith, Ceres, Inferno, Windows Phone 7, Windows Store, MicroEJ, watchOS bitcode,.... I think that the use of such systems has only increased, thanks to mainstream adoption of IoT devices and cloud environments. OEMs can change their hardware at will while supporting existing applications, and cloud environments can be heterogeneous, without much issues moving applications around.
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      > IBM mainframes language environments Not just mainframes either, AS/400 (for minicomputer-class machines, as opposed to mainframes) is the same way. A binary, hardware-independent VM is the officially-supported programming environment.
      • pjmlp 7y ago
        Thanks for the correction. On my mind AS/400 keeps being a mainframe, I keep forgetting it had another hardware class.