Re: Wine

[Christopher C Chimelis <chris@classnet.med.miami.edu>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Luke Shulenburger wrote:

> It recently came up on another list that I'm a member of so I thought I
> would aske the masters.  Will it be difficult to run wine on an alpha?
> (when wine gets more stable in general)  Will it be difficult to port to
> run with debian's current set of libraries?   Thanks for your replies.  

I've been loosely following that thread on axplist also.  My take on the
whole thing is: Why?  Granted, running NT-Alpha binaries would be good,
running NT-i386 binaries would not necessarily turn in the performance
expected for several reasons (which they've no doubt covered over there).
In short, the overhead of em86 having to handle all machine-level
corrections on something as complex as Wine would put such a hit on the
processor that you could more easily scrape together a 486 to turn in
better performance.

I'll keep a closer eyeball on that thread from now on, though, to see if
anyone comes up with some ideas as to how to counter the poor performance
argument (ie. if someone decides to port Wine to Alpha to emulate
NT-Alpha).

C