Re: architectural goals, Byte Addressability And Beyond

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:

I would like to keep testing the commercial product I work on in a
big-endian, alignment-trapping environment.

Computer architecture exhibits convergence.  Starting in the 1960s it
converged on byte addressing with 8-bit bytes and on 2s-complement,
starting in the 1980s it converged on IEEE FP, and ending in the 2010s
it converged on supporting unaligned accesses and on little-endian
byte order.  Your difficulties in getting hardware for testing whether
software can work with alignment restrictions and with big-endian byte
order is a result of that convergence.  Maybe your desire to keep your
software ready for big-endian hardware and hardware with alignment
restrictions is misguided.

New SPARC boxes are expensive, dealing with Oracle is hard work, and the
architecture has no future.

Ebay?

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>