ABIs and the futurrrr of UNIX(tm)

[Barry Shein]

>From Nathaniel Mishkin
>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?

To some extent I think you're being excessively paranoid tho the
concern is healthy. I don't know think that the intent is to define
"the" ABI, but rather "an" ABI.

The motivation, of course, is to encourage the third-party software
developers to sell binary "bubble-pak" software for Unix. Just like
they could for the IBM/PC, another "ABI" (Unix, until now, has only
been a source standard.)

Obviously in there lies some sort of zero-sum game. If there are
dozens of (accepted by the market) ABI's it sort of nullifies the
advantage of having any. If there are a few I guess it still works,
particularly if the architectures don't overlap entirely.

I don't think it distracts from developmental efforts necessarily,
they remain where they are today in most ways. In some ways they're
better off as now people like Microsoft have been encouraged to port
their code to Unix whereas before they stayed in the comfortable
domains of IBM/PCs and Macs, let's face it, for whatever reason these
guys required an ABI. So there's a better chance of going to them and
convincing them and other vendors to recompile their software for your
machine, and setting up some marketing agreement, assuming it takes
little more than a recompile to port to your whiz-bang architecture.

I would look at it as more of a new dimension, rather than detracting
from the current situation, one which a given vendor may or may not be
able to participate in and to varying degrees.

Think of it this way, how much trouble did AT&T declaring the 3B2 to
be the "porting base" cause? This will no doubt be more pervasive, but
I believe it's similar.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University