geoff-codes
Joined 12 years ago
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Comment · 11 years ago
Link: http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common...
Comment · 11 years ago
Of course its not. After all, why would it be?
Comment · 11 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
Suggest putting this in a repo somewhere, in the vein of:
https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books/blob/master/fr...
https://github.com/ligurio/free-software-testing-books/blob/...
etc.
Comment · 11 years ago
I don't think this holds water at all.
The crux of the article is:
> ...one last gap remains in the middle of this stack of system exclusivity: Apple licenses the instruction set architecture for its mobile devices from ARM.
But Apple already not only designs the own SoCs independently already, they regularly add their own opcodes to the ARM instruction sets they license, as they see fit.
The alternative to not licensing from ARM, even if they "invented their own ISA", would be to pay an exorbitant sum in royalties to ARM and every other patent-holder whose technology they might dare use in their chip. So paying ARM for their technology in one go just makes the most economical/legal sense.
Comment · 11 years ago
Not particlarly; in fact, apple has basically done this exact thing twice in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software).
But I believe we're (hypothetically) talking about ARM, not x86, code.
Comment · 11 years ago
Perhaps the word is 'pwn'?
Comment · 11 years ago
> There are LLVM targets with corresponding ABIs that are nonspecific to architectures like PNaCL but Apple is not using them
They do indeed support LLVM IR target(s) that are, in fact, much more architecturally-nonspecific than PNaCl, namely the spir[64]-unknown-unknown target. See https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIR and /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenCL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/openclc (on a Mac, since 10.7).
I don't know if bitcode with this target triple is necessarily suitable for the Apple Watch, however.
Comment · 11 years ago
A few more (particularly nspr and apr): http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/portability-libs/
Comment · 11 years ago
Agreed. Should have said "hopefully" rather than "probably".
Comment · 11 years ago
Ongoing? Maybe not. But, rather than talk IBM in 1984 (which is probably a bad example vis-a-vis Apple products and their breakthrough impact), I'll refer you to the facial tissue breakthrough product of 1980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLa0IGW1k8g