| > gaming coders learn more than standard coders do See the _Taos_ operating system. Based around something that conventional programming knowledge said was impossible. Created by games developers because they could. https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt... TL;DR All Taos code (except for some core device drivers for booting) is compiled for a nonexistent "Virtual Processor" (VP) and the VP bytecode is compiled to native code on the fly as it's loaded into RAM; the compiler is so efficient that the time delay of reading from hard disk is enough to generate native binaries with no significant delay. Result: not only is the entire OS above the bootloader not just portable but will execute unmodified on any supported CPU from x86 to Arm to MIPS to PowerPC, but it was possible to have heterogenous SMP. The Acorn RISC PC was an Arm desktop with an x86 second processor in a slot. Taos could execute on both at once. Taos evolved into Intent and Elate, and nearly became the next-gen Amiga OS, before Tao Group collapsed. Some of the team used to hang out on HN. The closest thing in the Unix world is Inferno, which is effectively UNIX 3.0 and is almost unknown today. Inferno embeds a bytecode runtime in the kernel, shared by the whole OS, and rewrites what was effectively Plan 9 2.0 in its own new descendant of C. So all binaries above the bootloader and kernel are cross-platform binaries that can execute directly on any CPU. |