Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Universal Emulators Return

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-soon-lead-to-helium-3 dept.

webmilhouse writes "Wired has an article about Transitive Corporation that claims their software "allows any software application binary to run on any processor/operating system" without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa, which Wired likened to digital alchemy. The Transitive software is supposed to be released today. What do you think, vaporware or miracle?"

4 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ by Nos. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Okay, but for a product that really is this good, why is the newest news on their site dated March 2003? (There's an article in 04, but it has nothing to do with what they're releasing)

  2. Re:Not vapor by Davak · · Score: 5, Interesting


    Yeah, obviously! :)

    QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor. It requires no user intervention: It kicks in automatically when a non-native application is launched.

    It sounds like it is software that translates one machine language to another? Pretty sweet idea!

    It will still have some java-ish problems with each different form of hardware needing a unique version to translate. And then updating each of those versions as each change in the operating systems occur, etc.

    Davak

  3. On their "technology overview" page... by Kippesoep · · Score: 5, Interesting

    there is mention only of unices. Operating System Mapper. Dynamite supports operating system mapping between any two Unix/Linux-like operating systems, as well as mapping between mainframe and any Unix/Linux-like operating systems. Don't see "Windows" mentioned in there. I assume it would be a lot easier to run a Linux version of Quake 3 on BSD-based Mac OS X than to convert stuff to/from a rather more different OS such as Windows.

  4. Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ by ajs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yep, none of this is new tech. In fact, it's pretty old tech at this point. Emulators/translators and everything in between have been the subject of experimentation for decades.

    Actually, I expect to see someone sit down and write this for Parrot sometime soon. Especially of interest would be an S/390 emulator written in Parrot.

    Parrot, for those who don't know, is a VM that targets very high level languages, but it's flexible enough and has a sufficiently strong JIT compiler that a hardware emulator extension to Parrot could easily produce code that would perform as well as the described product.

    The cool part about writing such an emulator for Parrot is that you get access to the resulting emulated code from a number of high-level languages, so you could port over your S/390 airline application written in TPF and call its routines from a Java, Perl, Scheme or Ruby program, jumping into and out of hardware emulation as you go. While high-level languages would only have gross access to data as opaque objects, the hardware emulator could provide the ported code with everything that it expects.

    "Emulation" is a sophisticated art at this point, and it's going to get very interesting over the next few years.