Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!BRL.MIL!mike
From: mike@BRL.MIL (Mike Muuss)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re:  Binary Compatability?
Message-ID: <8902282220.aa21482@SEM.BRL.MIL>
Date: 1 Mar 89 03:20:31 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22

Jim -

Thanks for confirming my suspicions.  The reason that I stopped using
the shared libraries is because PIXIE does not work on programs
that have been linked with a shared library.  This is a drag.

It is not at all clear to me that the choice you made w.r.t. the GL
interface was at all necessary.  I'm quite certain that you could have
carried support for all your different machines around in all versions
of the libraries.  I believe this could have been implemented in such a
way as to only require a single extra memory load (indirection) per
subroutine call, a small price to pay.

Negative comment:  different SGI models are entirely too different,
inside.  All the work that the GL has to do to hide the differences
is unfortunate, and bothersome.

Positive comment:  "IRIX" version 3.1, for the first time, actually
does a pretty good job of doing things.  But I still seem to waste
a lot of my time trying to accomplish things that should have been simple.

	-Mike