Re: Which Server Platform?

-----Original Message-----
From: David Cheatham <david(at)creeknet.com>
To: hwg-theory(at)hwg.org <hwg-theory(at)hwg.org>
Date: vrijdag 26 juni 1998 1:12
Subject: Re: Which Server Platform?


>Hmmm...slow emulator of other platforms. That's not really a valid
complaint, is it?
>Most equivalent platforms are slow when emulating each other. Of course,
we'll never
>know if NT can emulate Unix faster then Unix can emulate NT, because no one
will
>ever try to make an emulater of Unix that runs on NT, because Unix need a
*stable*
>platform to run on.


This is the fourth most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. UNIX needs a
stable platform to run on? UNIX doesn't need ANY platform to run on, a
UNIX-flavor IS an operating system. It IS the platform.

As for NT emulating UNIX, that might or might not be necessary. NT has
built-in support for POSIX applications, so you can compare those right off
the bat. As for non-POSIX, speed depends on the emulator as much as the
platform to be emulated. For instance, if I have a window object that
creates my platform's windows and I wanted to emulate a different windowing
system. The best way would be to subclass my own platform's window,
encapsulating behaviour the guest application wouldn't recognize and
offering what it would recognize (and require) as an interface for the
methods available from the host platform. That way I'm still using my host
platform's native code, with the speed of being native.
On the other hand, I could do some low-level programming, maybe hack into
code I'm not supposed to touch and try to write MY OWN windows to host a
guest application. If I knew what I was doing, that could also be very fast.
Or, if I was not lucky, it could be very, very slow because my code would
not make optimal use of the possibilities of the OS.
So you see, speed depends very much on the way the emulator works.....

Also, another point. How do you want to compare emulation of Windows on UNIX
to emulation of UNIX on Windows? You need the same application for a sound
comparison.

>Also, could the reason that the emulator takes a lot of space is because
windows
>takes a lot of space?


That, again, depends on the emulator.

Ben Z. Tels
optimusb(at)stack.nl
http://www.stack.nl/~optimusb/

"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle
forever."
                                                    --Tsiolkovsky

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