Re: [elysium-developers] IDE code

[Claus M. <cla...@ma...>]

I agree that given the facts in hand, doing any kind of "simulation" of a
64-bit processor is not efficient. I also concur that we should try to
achieve cross-platform independency through libraries. This does present a
problem, though, since we quickly could run into problems with the libraries
being the de facto standard for calling the kernel - which is *not* what we
want, since people should want to write things directly for the kernel to
avoid unfortunate abstractions. I don't know if we can design a library
broad enough in scope to make it interesting in both 32 and 64 bit, but in
all circumstances this is somewhat against the exo spirit.

You seem to feel that the IA-64 is a poor standard. I have never had the
chance to work with it (for obvious reasons), but it sure does seem to be a
heck of a lot easier writing efficient compilers for it rather than IA-32.
But, technical arguments aside, we cannot ignore IA-64 for one reason:
market dominance. Wether it's a good standard or not, in a few years (2-3,
perhaps 4) it will probably be Intels only standard, certainly so for the
high-end machines that really *need* something like Elysium. Ignoring it
would be like when Steve Jobs ignored putting network hardware in Apple
computers some years back, because he felt that having computers in a
network was, and I quote, "wrong". This, of course, cost Apple hundreds of
thousands, not to say millions. There is of course still a chance that Intel
loses market dominance to for example AMD or the Alpha, but I sincerely
doubt that. Especially AMD seems unlikely to make anything not
Intel-compatible. They are famous for being better at implementing the IA-32
better than Intel, but they are *not* famous for inventing new
architectures.

How should a cross-platform, nonrestricting library for the lowest levels in
Elysium look? And should we have one at all? Suggestions are welcome.

- xmentor