ABIs and the futurrrr of UNIX(tm)

[Nathaniel Mishkin]

In article <431 at micropen> dave at micropen (David F. Carlson) writes:
>I believe what we all seek is a means of portability across machines lines
>without having to support N-machines to sell a product.  Parts of this are in
>place:  COFF has conversion routines for correctly ordering big-endian vs. 
>little-endian data sections.  Why can't a machine independent intermediate
>form be developed for UNIX solely to be translated into native binary on the
>target machine by a similar utility? 

Nice idea, but I'm dubious that all the people who are inventing and
implementing new instruction architectures would be able to shoehorn
in all their compiler and architectural smartness into a "universal"
intermediate form.

What mystifies me about this whole ABI business is not so much the desire
for a set of ABIs, one per low-level hardware architecture, but the idea
that some people (Sun? AT&T?) appear to express for a *single* ABI based
on a single architecture.  I mean, is the world really ready to standardize
on any single architecture that exists today?  It just seems absurd to
me.  If the world had standardized on a single architecture just a few
years ago, some of the recent fairly radical, but apparently successful
architectural ideas (e.g. Multiflow's VLIW) might never have made it
into the real world.  Is it really in the long term interest of end-users
to run the risk of stifling that sort of development?  Or am I being
excessively paranoid about all this?