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And let's not forget that OPENSTEP happily ran apps that were compiled to work on 68k, 486, PA-RISC and SPARC.


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Openstep supported quad fat binaries iirc, supporting x86, sparc, mips, and I think pa-risc. Gotta say the NeXT software architecture has aged well.

OpenStep supported four processor architectures before it got ported to PowerPC, and used to support "quad fat binaries" that would run seamlessly on all four architectures.

I always figured this had to be the case. OPENSTEP 4.2 ran just fine on x86, why give that up?

Hmm, got some OpenStep for x86 disks roaming about somewhere. I should give it a try.

I have had a tough time emulating even OpenStep on x86, excited to see NeXT attempt to be run semi-natively. It is still one of my favourite architectures and members of the home server farm. Looking forward to seeing where this ends up.

I believe multi-platform executables date back to NeXTStep, which supported 68K/x86/Sparc/HPPA binaries.

OpenSUSE still builds i686 ISOs. Of course if you want to go crazy there's always TinyCore.

I hope that some day ppc64{le,be} get there soon. Would love to use openpower based completly open systems. Atleast for the time-being only OpenPower matches or beats the performance profiles of x86_64.

Yeah x86 has vendors that don't absolutely despise opensource software.

This is exactly how some SPARC workstations offered x86 compatibility back in the day IIRC.

And FWIW Open Firmware runs on x86 too.

Apparently an older version was opensourced at some point. I don't see why the people who love it don't port it to x86.

Wow, fantastic!

> amusingly the executables i built 15 years ago still run on current gnu/linux; not sure if that would be true for things linked with libx11 and libxext, certainly not libgtk

win32 is how you write software you want to run forever thanks to the large user base.

I'm hoping for a wine cosmopolitan binary that would render to sixels: that would run on about everything, with qemu ensuring it keeps working if/when arm64 or mips64 take over amd64


Lol. It only took openvms to get on x86 what, 25 years?

OpenSPARC is apparently used as a base for the Elbrus CPU line in Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S

That specific chip I linked to the article about has the ability to run x86 code via translation and they claim it can run Windows. Guess that solves the chicken and egg issue, but the biggest problem is who would be willing to fab it for them, sad that politics and war interrupted this.


It now has X86 and ARM backends.

Any of them MIPS or SPARC? Or how about something a little more exotic?

How is it everyone is overlooking that I'm talking about CPU architectures?

Seriously what's with people these days just playing on a few x86 PCs and maybe a raspberry Pi and then making bold claims their distro x runs on everything. Lets talk about some real niche platforms that are non-trivial to port software to please.


I believe at that time, Linux only ran on x86.

Looks like it might have been nice were not so x86-specific, and obsolete x86 at that.
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