Re: DragonEgg has been revived

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

On Thursday, 24 May 2018 17:44:22 UTC+1, Dan'l Miller  wrote:

> Oh great.  Now I have convinced myself that there is enough sketchiness/dodginess in this vicinity to question whether Apple's forthcoming App-Store LLVM-bitcode-IR recompiler wouldn't satisfy any one or more required terms of any GPLv3-with-RLEv3.1-licensed compiler (FSF or otherwise) in such as way as to cause both:
> 1) the app to need to provide its Source Code;
> and
> 2) Apple to need to provide the Installation Information and Corresponding Source Code on a “consumer” device that is not-“sufficiently” “industrial”, where that consumer device (e.g., an Apple iDevice) might be a User Product in the terms of GPLv3.
> and thus
> 3) merely compiling the app with GPLv3-with-RLEv3.1-licensed compiler (and the app invoking at least one subroutine in the RLEv3.1-licensed runtime) could conceivably be enough for Apple to reject such apps from the App Store, so that Apple need not satisfy #2 above.
> 
> https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/06/17/apples-biggest-developer-news-at-wwdc-that-nobodys-talking-about-bitcode
> 
> Apparently Apple is either working on a McSema-esque technology or would require the app to be (also?) provided in the form of LLVM-bitcode-IR (in addition? to ARM-processor machine-code) at the time of submission to the App Store for approval.

They're not doing anything of the sort. They used to use fat binaries containing both m68k and powerpc, then both 32/64 bit x86. For this they'll use LLVM bitcode, which is IR compiled to LLVM's bitcode, something that's been in LLVM since it started. One of the major pros about that bitcode is that you can then do aggressive linking and stripping before installation.

We talked about a similar mechanism for a platform neutral binary for AmigaOS NG BITD, but that never happened, well it did sort of with Tao, but it never got anywhere and Tao went out of business.