Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/09/07/15:46:13
Nate Eldredge writes:
> Incidentally, I have heard that various people working under temporary
> NDA's are already porting GCC to the Merced, so when the Merced comes
> out, GCC may already work on it.
A version of Linux has already been demonstrated running on the prototype
Merced hardware, and it is a safe bet that they must have a working gcc
version to have produced this. We'll find out more once the hardware is
released and all the code comes out from under NDA...
> Word from Microsoft is that they will not be able to get a 64-bit
> version of Windows out until ~2003, and it will be a complete re-write
>
> "Complete rewrite" sounds unlikely to me. There is already NT for the
> Alpha, and I doubt it was a complete rewrite.
I have a feeling that NT on the Alpha was only a 32 bit version, though,
running in a backward compatibility mode (shades of 16 bit Windows on a
386 :-) And as of last week, Microsoft have officially dropped all
their development work on NT/Alpha. You are quite right that it ought
not to be so hard to make existing code work in a 64 bit environment,
especially when you consider what they must have learned from their
past experiences in the 16 to 32 bit transition, but they do seem to
be having major problems with it. From what I've read, 64 bit Windows
is a totally separate code tree from win2000, and the two versions will
be developed individually but in tight sync for at least the next couple
of years.
Who knows, though: press releases and random news articles are not a
very reliable source of info. Remember, though, that this is the company
who were able to get NT running on several different processor families,
but only as long as they were little endian. Portable code is obviously
not one of their strong points...
This is getting fairly off topic for a djgpp group, though :-) To move
things back a bit further in the right direction, I find the Linux
DOSEMU program does a much better job of running djgpp programs than
an NT dos box (it even supports SVGA VESA graphics in a window!), so
who cares what Microsoft do: there are plenty of other nice environments
where we can all go on using our favorite software.
Shawn Hargreaves.
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