Re: Anybody has experience with SLIM BINARIES?

On 13 Jul 1997 John wrote:


>Paul
>[I would carefully investigate the many failed UNCOL projects over the
>past 40 years to be sure you understand why creating and using a
>common intermediate code is much harder than it looks.


I know, you can add my now abandoned 'ucode' project to those 40 years
:-). Nevertheless I'm working on a sequel right now (U++). Don't
worry, I don't have the illusion of building an ideal UNCOL that
covers all platforms. What I basicly want is a code-definition that's
potentially portable to N platforms. This doesn't cover all aspects of
all known OSes, just a healthy subset.


>Slim binaries
>are a fine idea for Macs where you have different instruction sets
>with identical operating systems and data formats. As soon as you
>have more moving parts, the idea starts to collapse. -John]


Well, I haven't seen the SlimBin specs, but knowing that they are
created (only?) by the Oberon environment I assume the code would be
pretty well usable outside the Mac environment. Portability, I guess,
mostly boils down to how abstract (system-indepent) you define the
API. Java seems to be doing pretty well on N platforms these days.
Something similar could be done using slim binaries, only without the
JVM overhead.


Paul
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