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It would, but Apple did the same thing when they switched to Intel and worked out pretty well. They even shipped all the PowerPC binaries for a while, together
by sjmulder 14y ago
It would, but Apple did the same thing when they switched to Intel and worked out pretty well. They even shipped all the PowerPC binaries for a while, together with an emulation layer, so you could run old apps on Intel (albeit slowly).
It's more of a backwards compatibility/marketing issue, I suppose. Apple could afford to have programs work 'more or less', Microsoft with its track record for backwards compatibility probably cannot.
- ams6110 14y agoApple (and NeXT before them) was able to compile "fat" (multi-architecture) app binaries since the 1990s. The original NeXT machines had Motorola 68030 and later 68040 processors; OpenSTEP also ran on Sparc and Intel and I think PA-RISC also, of course then PPC, and then Intel again --- they've had architecture independence in their frameworks for a LONG time.
- wmf 14y agoEmulation is fine when you're switching to a faster processor (68K -> PPC, PPC -> Intel). In this case, MS is introducing a slower processor so emulation would probably be painful.
- meaty 14y agoWell they shot themselves there. The CLR was supposed to be the portability layer i.e. IL code would be dynamically compiled. Unfortunately due to Microsoft's schizophrenia, it never became a first class part of the OS over say non-portable PE x86 specific binaries. Technically they could use dynamic translation, but building a working translator for x86->arm would be an absolute bastard as x86 is such a non-orthagonal mess of an architecture.