Re: Is Linux Unix?
Steve Lamb <grey@dmiyu.org> wrote in message news:<2lcY2-2J5-9@gated-at.bofh.it>...
> Ryo Furue wrote:
> > Some open source software like GNU emacs runs on most Unixes.
> > I bet a LOT of resources went into it.
>
> Some? Some!? slrn, apache, mysql, screen, joe, bind, X, vim, kde,
> openoffice, perl, python, php, ruby, just to name a few off the top of my
> head. Some of those are written and maintained by a single person. Earlier
> you wrote...
>
> > The example I gave in my last message about the Intel compilear is a piece
> > of evidence which supports my opinion.
>
> The above examples refute it.
Good! Please tell Intel that it's easy to write a compiler to run on all major
brands of Unixes. A single person can do that. Why can't Intel? I can't
verify how correct your statement is. I don't know exactly how much effort went
into emacs to make it portable, exactly how difficult to write a compiler is,
etc. I may be wrong in saying the efforts to make emacs portable were huge.
But, if it's so easy to write a portable code, why doesn't Intel do that?
I'm not asking Intel to support all Unixes. I'm merely asking to support all
Linuxes. Why don't they do that if it's so easy?
I thought that it was because each distribution of Linux is a little bit
different from each other and this makes writing a portable code non-trivial.
But, many people here in this discussion group seem to be in a different
opinion. Writing a portable code is easy. Intel doesn't write portable
code because . . . ., why? Perhaps because of sheer laziness? I think they
will be happy if their compiler runs on Debian, SuSE, etc. I don't think
they gain anything by deliberately excluding other brands of Linux than RedHat.
I don't think of any other reason why they don't want to support Debian than
that that would incur significant cost which they don't want to pay.
Anyway, I'll stop generalization. This may be a special case, but it is a
special case which is very important to me. The only open source Fortran 95
compiler is very inferior to Intel's, at present. It *will* become as mature
as gcc one day and it may become superior to Intel's one day. But,
unfortunately, it's not now.
Cheers,
Ryo
Reply to: