20 Feb
2020
20 Feb
'20
3:09 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2020 at 15:20, Michael Huff <mphuff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've only tried it in virtual machines. It feels
slower and more sluggish
than OpenIndiana (which is based on Illumos, which is the post-Oracle open
solaris) -but I don't use OI a whole lot either.
Since there's an opening I'm curious about something mentioned earlier in
the thread, so I'll ask.
It was said earlier that SunOS included a compiler, but it was dropped in
Solaris. Was it possible for people to carry over the old SunOS compiler
and use it on Solaris? Did people do that, or did they just have their
companies spring for the actual Solaris compiler?
In short: no. SunOS binaries would usually run on Solaris if you had all of
the right libraries, etc. but the compilers created totally different
code. SunOS was a.out and Solaris was ELF; SunOS was BSD and Solaris was
SYSV. Solaris was a huge shift away from SunOS; they were effectively
entirely different operating systems for the same hardware. I don't know
if there was some sort of trade-in discount for the old compiler when you
upgraded to Solaris, there might have been. SunOS continued to be patched
and supported long after Solaris was released. There were many reasons for
this, but the short summary is that many people didn't want to have to move
to an entirely new OS, or for some reason couldn't. The analogy that comes
to mind is the shift from the classic Mac OS to OS X: your old programs
would probably run if they weren't too concerned about the internals of the
OS, but it was a big upheaval and most everything had to be rewritten to
some degree.
-Henry