Re: The joy of Democracy

On Thu, 24 Oct 2024, rbowman wrote:

On Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:11:09 +0200, D wrote:
>

Was it very difficult to develop on AIX and then move stuff over to
linux?

>
Not very. Most of it was having different compiler flags and libs in the
Makefiles. AIX was very forgiving about null references and a few other
things that Linux was picky about so there was a burst of bug fixes that
improved the code.
>
IPC was done with ONC-RPC so there was no problem with AIX daemons and
Linux clients. Eventually that led to some inefficiency. RS6000 is big
endian and the ONC-RPC XDR encoding is big endian across the network. The
Linux boxes would swap the order when decoding the XDR. When clients
switched to cheaper x86 boxes the data was still big-endian encoded on the
little-endian machines, shipped across the network, and decoded back to
little-endian.
>
The MKS Nutcracker tools and runtime was used on Windows boxes so that was
another set of entries in the Makefiles to build the Windows executables.
Again there weren't a lot of changes.
>

Very interesting! Thank you very much for the description.