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Comment by andreiw | Hacker News Reader

Not true. When multiarch mattered (NT 3 and 4), Microsoft was the only vendor that delivered the exact same OS, device support and development environment across x86, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC, and pushed the industry towards standardization. Microsoft has always taken arch and platform independence seriously, and this was evident even in 2010 when I worked on NT. You could rebuild the whole system for any supported arch (x86, x64, ia64 when that mattered), now arm and arm64

It's funny, but Microsoft was spot on correct to continue supporting 32-bit x86 on par with x64. Now they can just support BTing 32 x86 on ARM64 instead of being forced to support 64-on-64, which would simply involve more overhead.

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Great points. It is an odd fact that Microsoft generally avoided writing operating systems on or for Intel x86 processors [1], and started the development of both NT and CE on Risc processors.

Meanwhile, Linus had a PC with an Intel 386 processor, so that's what he started Linux on and for...

[1] MS DOS was based on code that Microsoft bought in, not having time to develop it from scratch. However, Microsoft did have some success on x86 with its PC version of Unix, which was called Xenix.

Not that odd. The NT group specifically wanted a portable design, and they made the right call to initially target i860, MIPS and only then i386 machines. Contrast that to OS/2 development - the (never shipped) PowerPC OS/2 port was based on top of of an IBM fork of Mach, because the kernel was too x86 specific (derived from the pre-virtual memory 16-bit protected mode code).

BTing?

Binary Translating.

Basically a JIT that recompiles (for example) 32bit x86 instructions to ARM64, so that you can run old apps on new CPUs.

DEC had FX!32 to run x86 Windows NT programs on Alpha Windows NT.

Apple licensed Transitive's QuickTransit to run PPC OSX apps on x86 Macs, though in typical Apple style they renamed it "Rosetta".

Is this the same as code morphing mentioned here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

Article seems to say NVidia couldn't get a license from Intel.

I worked with those guys on a project - also PPC to x86. It was pretty amazing and they were solid. Sad that so much of it ended up at IBM.

Apple's marketing around it was amazing; you'd think Apple built the technology in house.

Binary translation / JIT. Like Apple did with Rosetta or like DEC did on Alpha NT with FX!32.

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