Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 23rd Oct 2010 22:23 UTC
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Member since:
2010-03-08
The part up to the optimizing VM runtime can be provided be the hardware vendor.
1/Graphic card drivers are generally linked to a single hardware platform, so how do they benefit from that interpreted ecosystem, knowing that they'll include a large amount of bus-specific code anyway ?
2/The vendor does have to provide some kind of source code (as opposed to platform-dependent binary) if we want the program to be compiled/interpreted on multiple platforms. If he does not want it to be human-readable, the best he can do is using an automated code obfuscation system like the one offered by Java...
Wrong, he must provide several images, since as you said a (tiny but necessary) part of the OS has to be hardware-dependent. Moreover, if the code has been properly written, the OS vendor generally only has to patch it once too. The extra step is to recompile it once for each supported platform, but if he doesn't do it, someone will have to do it at his place.
You can see it this way : either the OS vendor compiles one image per platform, or each user, on each platform, will have to compile an image in real-time at first boot and experience the sluggish Gentoo-style first impression that this leads to.
Edited 2010-10-25 16:18 UTC