[Info-vax] redbean and the Actually Portable Executable

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 6/20/22 16:00, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2022-06-20 18:35:05 +0000, Bill Gunshannon said:
> 
>> On 6/20/22 14:28, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 6/20/2022 12:02 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>>> On 2022-06-20 13:21:42 +0000, plugh said:
>>>>> "Compile and run on any x86 OS"...
>>>>
>>>> Very clever proof-of-concept work, though probably not going to be 
>>>> all that workable for production apps given the shifting 
>>>> foundations, and with increasing requirements for app security.
>>>>
>>>> As alternatives go, WebAssembly is a shade less hackish, for the 
>>>> folks that do need cross-platform portability: https://webassembly.org
>>>>
>>>> Apps can be built to JavaScript, too. As has been posted around here 
>>>> before: https://emscripten.org and https://bellard.org/jslinux/ and 
>>>> such.
>>>>
>>>> And apps running directly on JRE are yet another portable 
>>>> alternative, and those apps are rather more supportable.
>>>>
>>>> OpenVMS does have an older JRE available (based on OpenJDK 8), 
>>>> though no Wasm support and/or emscripten support and/or Wasmer 
>>>> https://wasmer.io support.
>>>
>>> The reality is that in 2022 it is more normal to run the same stuff 
>>> on any platform than not.
>>
>> UCSD tried that back in 1974.  It was popular for about 6 or 7 years.
> 
> The 1970s-era UCSD Pascal and its p-Machine and the Terak hardware were 
> (in aggregate) not known for stability. Things have gotten vastly better 
> in the ensuing ~40 years.

UCSD Pascal ran on a lot more than the Terak (which had ore legal
troubles than technical troubles).  It ran on most of the popular
Micros and even some minis.  I had LSI-11 (Terak), PDP-11, Z80,
M68K and IBM PC versions.  I used it on the SAGE.  It could run
on anything that ran CPM.  I never saw a stability problem.  The
only real problem it had was the really hokie disk structure it
used.  Without fiddling with the disk before running a program
SVS Fortran77 could only have one file open at a time or, you
might just run out of space because it opened a file in a small
hole on the disk.  But I never had a system actually crash.

Companies like PCD Software sold lots of applications in P-code
that ran on any of the available systems (but their top target
seemed to be the PC even back then.)  Financials, Doctor's Office,
Payroll, GL, AR/AP, Inventory.  It was mostly software piracy (in
its infancy but already growing back then) that hurt them the most
and they finally just closed up shop.

bill