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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

    It has been reported to compile on the following other platforms,

    SunOS 4.1.3 & Solaris 2.x (Sparc)
    Alpha GNU/Linux, gcc
    HP-UX 9/10/11, PA-RISC, gcc/cc
    IRIX 6.5, gcc
    m68k NeXTSTEP, gcc
    Compaq Alpha Tru64 Unix, gcc
    FreeBSD, OpenBSD & NetBSD, gcc
    Cygwin
    Apple Darwin 5.4
    Hitachi SR8000 Super Technical Server, cc

I love that they are still doing this. Nothing shakes out numerical bugs like testing on different hardware designs. Would have been good to run the test suite with ICC and Clang too tho', to be sure.

PS I also love that Hitachi have a product called the "Super Technical Server" :-)

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Ordinarily, I'd insert a comment here on how much I miss my old NeXTCube, SparcStation, Apollo, AlphaStation, or Indy...

But the fact is I really, really don't. We are so spoiled now. Spinning up an AWS gpu cluster in 60 seconds from the beach beats spending a day and a half just to upgrade a video card ;)

Living in a monoculture requires an understanding of local maxima that I think hasn't been well thought through. So much innovation came from all those competing hardware designs and OSs.

This optimization problem you're conceptualizing is a very strange one indeed. It's like the only outcome we care about is achieving some perfect architecture.

In a dynamic optimization problem, where we have to take into account the current state of the world, and our ignorance of the future, sometimes the most efficient use decision is going with what we have, since it's good enough.

I'll put this another way: I don't think there's some terrible shortage of fundamental computer science research out there, nor is there a shortage of competing architectures.

One more spin on this. The fact that we have fewer competing architectures than we used to is itself a sign that existing architectures are pretty good. First, they are the survivors, and have out-competed the rest. Second, more importantly, if less research is being done to develop competing platforms, that means researchers are less optimistic about their ability to improve on what we currently have.

Yeah on the other hand supported archaic systems that nobody really uses makes the code harder to maintain resulting in more security vulnerabilities (e.g. OpenSSL).

It wasn't operating systems or hardware that was the problem with OpenSSL, it was supportimg bits of the protocol that noone actually used.

Keeping the code clean by compiling on different platforms, can only make it better and more future proof.

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