Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!bu.edu!xylogics!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: IBM RISC Message-ID: <1990Feb26.212613.5734@world.std.com> Date: 26 Feb 90 21:26:13 GMT References: <9376@portia.Stanford.EDU> <00405@sarek.UUCP> Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die Lines: 60 In-Reply-To: schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu's message of 26 Feb 90 07:19:03 GMT >Don't take my word for it, look at recent history. Three years ago a >Sun4 was just a wet dream. Now SPARC is Sun's flagship architecture. >If porting software was that serious a problem we'd know it. Ditto for >MIPS, ibm RT, Moto 88K, etc, of course. Granted, the key to all this >is coding applications in a high level language and for a portable OS. Yes, it's true that machines have been ported to in big ways, particularly machines which run Unix. But that doesn't mean it's easy and there's little resistance out there. I'm doing a major port right now of a major piece of software (mpofs) just about everyone on this list has heard of. I've also ported some major hunks of university-ware that were non-trivial, like GNU Emacs, Franz Lisp, Macsyma, KCL, TeX, etc. The QA tests alone (on the mpofs) have taken weeks and have turned up numerous little problems which are being fixed. Sure, just recompile, sure, it even *seems* to work, until someone bothers to notice that the floating point unit is a little different or some such thing, hey, it runs w/o a peep, even gives answers, who cares whether or not they're the same as you get on the other machines in the room. Customers are such nitpickers! There's a term in this business (this business being "software") called "code spreading". It is used to describe the result of putting your code onto more than one machine and maintaining the differences. It is a term which makes major software vendors quake, it's the dark side of portability. Sure, it's not all that much work to make things go on another relatively compatible platform. And I'm sure your customer service folks will pick up the little differences in system error messages, directory hierarchies, behavior on bootstrap and recovery mechanisms available, reliability quirks, floating point units, slight version differences in libraries, to socket or not to socket, etc etc in no time at all. And the customers can't expect to have these quirks of installation and operation in the manuals you ship, and besides, the printers will re-print all those manuals for free for you, it's just a "few leetle changes". And it's fortunate that the telepathic networks are in place so you merely have to finish the port and mentally think it out loud and every customer on the new platform will know about your product and begin ringing your phones! Won't cost a nickel. Let's leave it at: It's quite possible to have your software running on many different platforms, and it can even be very profitable. It's nice that this possibility is a thousand times more open than it was a decade ago. But it's not just a matter of getting someone to type "make install" on the new platform. Itt does take a good lump of cash and a lot of work to accomplish if your product is worth anything at all. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD