On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 16:46 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
The beauty (and bane) of the x86-64 architectures is that it enables us to effectively transition from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture. The bane is that some [lazy] developers don't want to make their code 64-bit clean. Additionally, 32-bit code running on a 64-bit OS on this architecture may run faster than if it were native. One thing we ran into on Alpha/NT is that we had a mode that allowed X86 code to run under emulation/translation so we had a good application base. The downside was that vendors didn't want to port their code to native Alpha so that we really never got a lot of good native Alpha applications.
Digital binary translation was _different_. It allowed non-native bytecode to run under the _same_ OS, libraries and memory model. Totally different and unrelated issue. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, technical annoyance mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ----------------------------------------------------------- Americans don't get upset because citizens in some foreign nations can burn the American flag -- Americans get upset because citizens in those same nations can't burn their own