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Re: Executor Features



On Thu, 20 Apr 1995, Mat Hostetter wrote:

> >>>>> "Thurman" == Thurman Gillespy <tg3@u.washington.edu> writes:
> 
>     Thurman> I only use Macs, but I am distributing an image display
>     Thurman> program for medical images. People always want to know
>     Thurman> about a PC version, and I'm obviously interested in
>     Thurman> having my program run with Executor. Someone in our
>     Thurman> department got NIH-Image to run on a PC, which greatly
>     Thurman> peaked my interest.  Unfortunately, I require some System
>     Thurman> 7 features, actually just the 4 required apple events,
>     Thurman> and the calls to CustomGetFile, CustomPutFile. So
>     Thurman> question 1, what are the plans for System 7 support? If
>     Thurman> you only supported the 4 required apple events, a lot
>     Thurman> more programs could run under executor.
> 
> We intend to "spoof" all of the "easy" System 7 features, including
> apple events.  Our preliminary plan is that the application will never
> see any apple events.  When it asks if any are present, the answer
> will just always come back "no".  That should make most apps happy.

If they were programmed for this contingency. But System 7 has been out 
quite a while, and newer programs are going to require its presence.
 
> We also plan to implement many of the System 7 filesystem extensions.
> We intend to begin work on this as soon as 1.99m is out.  Hopefully
> we'll be able to spoof enough traps that many System 7 programs will
> run.  Tricky stuff, like QuickTime, is out of the question for now,
> but most programs don't appear to demand the tricky stuff.

Yes, I agree.

>     Thurman> Question 2. How feasible would it be to specify a (bogus)
>     Thurman> system call that actually pointed to some 386/486 code
>     Thurman> that would run in native mode?  This code would make no
>     Thurman> calls to the Mac API, but could do a processing intensive
>     Thurman> task that normally takes a real hit when run in
>     Thurman> emulation. With the release of the Metrowerks CodeWarrior
>     Thurman> Platinum system next month, this kind of mixed
>     Thurman> development will actually become very easy on the Mac.
> 
> That wouldn't be hard at all; in fact, Executor already uses a
> mechanism like this internally.  We just don't (yet) have any
> incentive to provide a public API for it.  You have to beware of the
> fact that x86 code manipulates little endian data, while a 68k
> program's data is stored in big endian byte order.

I work with medical images, and the endian/byte order issue is something 
that we have to handle all the time.

Here's two incentives for providing a public API for x86 native code trap: 

Incentive #1:

PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE

Ok, that didn't work. Lets try...

Incentive #2:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Are you guys nuts? There is *tremendous* interest in cross platform 
development from Mac developers. Believe me, there are no good solutions 
that cost under many thousands of dollars. I think the idea of using your 
emulator to handle the GUI stuff, and then doing computationally 
intensive work in native x86 code is a BIG winner.

Best regards,

Thurman Gillespy III
Department of Radiology
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington



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