Unix optimized for SPARC?

[Gary Allen]

In article <253 at iconsys.UUCP> ron at iconsys.UUCP (Ron Holt) writes:
>
>Recently, there has been fear expressed that evil AT&T and Sun will
>some how optimize future versions of Unix for SPARC.  Considering the
>portability of Unix being one of its best known traits, wouldn't this
>be rather difficult to do?  I wouldn't consider BSD optimized for the
>VAX nor SVR3 optimized for the 3B2 even though these machines were
>used as the porting bases for their respective Unix variants.  Of course,
>there are very machine specific sections of the Unix kernel, the VM code
>being a good example, but other than that, how could Unix be optimized
>for SPARC?
>-- 
>Ron Holt                     UUCP: {uunet,caeco}!iconsys!ron

No one has called Sun or AT&T evil (although some people seem to believe
them altruistic). Every person, organization, and company is full of built-in
predjudices about the way things are, the way things should be, what's "normal"
what's not, etc. Unfortunately, these biases affect the way we all do things.
People by their nature do what's in their interests, hardly realizing that
what they percieve as the normal correct way to do things is only so in their
own context. Do you believe that UNIX ala SUN/AT&T would just HAPPEN to
work out well for Apollo's PRISM risc machine and poor for their own SPARC?
Hardly! That's not evil on their part nor is there some conspiracy to do
anybody in.

A tiny tiny tiny tiny example: years ago, I worked with a machine whose native
mode of handling chars was unsigned. Now, K&R's C manual specifically stated
that the sign of the 'char' type was machine dependent and beyond the scope
of the C language definition (yeah, I know the diff between C and UNIX). So,
C chars on that machine were implemented unsigned; seems pretty reasonable
huh? Well, you wouldn't believe all of the trouble that this caused. There
was much UNIXage that simply wouldn't work right, let alone dozens of customer
applications that had to be #ifdef'ed to death, if we could even get their
business (porting was a BIG deal in those days). The situation was so bad that
we had to take a performance hit (on a machine whose main virtue was brute
horsepower) and simulate signed characters. Where was the evil, the conspiracy,
incompetence, or brilliance. Nowhere!!

That's why the Celtics aren't allowed to provide the referees when they play the
lakers, and why my ex-wives (thank god) weren't allowed to pass divorce decrees.
NOBODY IS IMPARTIAL!!

I don't represent anybody, I'm totally irresponsible.
Gary Allen
Apollo Computer
Chelmsford, MA
{decvax,yale,umix}!apollo!gallen

"Oh Yeah, our CEO can beat up your CEO!"