On Wed, 19 Feb 2020 at 15:20, Michael Huff <mphuff@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