From: jgd@cix.co.uk
In article <10asked$2lq0s$3@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
D_Oliveiro) wrote:
Lawrence D_Oliveiro wrote:
> The fact that many of the ports you mention never made it to
> production release, and even the ones (other than x86) that did are
> now defunct, I think reinforces my point. The ports were difficult
> and expensive to create, and difficult and expensive to maintain.
> In the end they were all just abandoned.
Microsoft is a commercial organisation, and has to pay staff for all the
work done on Windows. This increases costs compared to open-source work
that doesn't show up in the costs for Linux, or the BSDs. I've worked on
thoroughly portable application software for Windows NT (and Unixes)
since 1995. My employers have at least considered porting to every
Windows NT platform available. I've been involved with those decisions
and done the more recent ports.
i860 never appeared in machines people could buy.
In the mid-1990s, MIPS R3000 and R4000 were only available in expensive
workstations from MIPS, DEC and SGI. SGI had an ongoing internal
disagreement over embracing Windows NT or sticking with Irix. The only NT
machines they ever sold were Intel-based.
There was a company - NetPower - that planned to sell R4000-based
machines in the high-end PC market, and we had one of their prototypes
for porting. They had not launched the machines when the Pentium Pro
completely destroyed MIPS' performance advantage over x86. NetPower
switched to x86.
Intergraph Clipper was abandoned by the manufacturer before any machines
were sold for Windows NT.
x86 was the usual platform for Windows NT. The saying my team coined was
"If you don't know about processor architectures, you want Intel. If you
want the fastest CPU and can cope with a lot of software not being
available, you want Alpha. If you really, really believe in IBM's
strategy and are prepared to pay at least three times as much to stick
with it, you want PowerPC. There isn't a reason that good to want MIPS."
Alpha was killed by Compaq. This was announced about a week after a
prototype Merced had first booted Windows. Compaq didn't see the point in
continuing to fund Alpha development when Itanium was going to be great.
Or so they thought.
Alpha 64-bit was continued by Microsoft for a while when Itanium hardware
wasn't readily available, as already discussed.
PowerPC was abandoned by Microsoft. We considered supporting it, but the
IBM RS/6000 hardware it needed was very expensive, and we weren't getting
any requests to support it. If the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference
Platform project had been adopted it might have had a future, but IBM and
Apple both had motive to prevent that happening.
Itanium was an expensive fiasco in the general computing market. Its sole
benefit to Windows was that it taught Microsoft a lot about doing 64-bit.
They made a good decision in dropping it early on,
AMD64 is the main Windows platform now. My experience of porting to it
was that it took less than 5% of the work required for Itanium. According
to AMD, Microsoft were responsible for Intel building AMD-compatible
x86-64. Their original plan was to use a different instruction encoding,
to force software vendors to do separate builds for AMD and Intel. They
hoped that many would not bother with AMD, and thus drive them out of the
market. Microsoft said if Intel did that, they wouldn't have Windows for
it, and Intel had to back down.
32-bit ARM was part of one of Microsoft's less good ideas. There appears
to be a widespread opinion within the company that the Windows GUI is
intrinsically and obviously superior to any other. There is no single
best GUI, IMHO. In any case, Microsoft's reaction to the iPad was to
create several generations of "iPad killer" tablets, none of which got
anywhere.
They had obnoxiously cut-down versions of Windows which made it very hard
to test software unless you worked in the exact way that Microsoft had
prepared for. I severed relations with the Microsoft person who was
trying to get me to support one of these after he'd told us an important
wrong fact - people make mistakes - but not told us when he learned it
was wrong, and refused to apologise for the omission. I'd done several
weeks of work on the basis of that claim, proved it false and asked him
"What the hell?"
32-bit ARM is dying anyway, because the 32- and 64-bit ISAs are very
different, far more so than for any other architecture I know, and modern
core designs are 64-bit-only. Leaving out 32-bit execution makes the
cores smaller and cheaper, so it is disappearing.
64-bit ARM is where full-strength Windows with all the tools appeared on
ARM. Its final success is not yet decided, but it's already much better
than any other non-x86 Windows.
> Even the concept of a portable OS seems to have gone from Windows
> nowadays. It has taken Microsoft a lot of trouble to come up with
> the ARM port, for example, and I don't think the compatibility
> issues have entirely been worked out, even after all these years.
From interacting with them on this quite a bit, the trouble seems to have
been accepting that they needed to do the job thoroughly, and provide
development tools. I contributed to this in a small way, by running the
Visual Studio command-line tools that targeted ARM64 under the x86
emulator. This allowed me to use our custom build environment, making the
porting job far simpler. The IDE would not run that way, which affects me
about as much as the rainfall in the Gobi Desert. After a while,
Microsoft started producing native ARM64 tools.
> A RISC-V Windows port will likely never happen.
Quite likely not, because RISC-V is suffering from an ongoing failure to
produce cores fast enough for desktops, or even mobile devices. This has
lasted long enough that I'm becoming doubtful it will ever happen.
John
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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