Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Nov 2009 23:05 UTC
As we all know, Mac OS X has support for what is called 'fat binaries'. These are binaries that can carry code for for instance multiple architectures - in the case of the Mac, PowerPC and x86. Ryan Gordon was working on an implementation of fat binaries for Linux - but due to the conduct of the Linux maintainers, Gordon has halted the effort.
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Member since:
2005-08-12
Christ, cry me a river about "disk accesses." The average Walmart PC comes with a terabyte of storage, and a staggering majority of the world has access to at minimum a four-megabit broadband connection. Go check out the size of your average executable. I'm on a Windows machine, so heading over to my System32 folder, I see the following:
* 9MB - mshtml.dll - The Trident rendering engine, the largest and most complicated part of Internet Explorer.
* 2MB - explorer.exe - Your start menu and file manager.
* 13MB - shell32.dll - All of the Windows UI control implementation
* 5MB - ntoskrnl.exe (!!!) - The Windows kernel, including all process and memory management, is five megabytes.
I can't believe anyone would spend the better part of an hour compiling from source to save 5 megabytes, not to mention that the source of any given application tends to be substantially larger than the binary it produces anyway!
Live and let live, though, I guess. I don't use Linux, so it doesn't affect me either way.