[erlang-questions] Why Erlang/OTP binaries are available only for Win32 ?

[Icarus Alive]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 3:34 AM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On 9/11/2010, at 6:36 PM, Icarus Alive wrote:
>>> Let's see.  I have to worry about Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, OpenBSD,
>>> Solaris, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu 32-bit, Ubuntu 64-bit, Centos 32-bit, Centos
>>> 64-bit, and Fedora.  Just how many sets of binaries do you expect to be
>>> provided?  Then there are some older machines that would be fun to set
>>> up, several PowerPC boxes and a couple of SPARCs.  How many sets of
>>> binaries?
>>
>> Am new to the whole Erlang ecosystem (language, runtime, community,
>> resources), so pardon me if this the expectation seemed excessive. For
>> one single person building/maintaining so many variants is definitely
>> a herculean task,
>
> I didn't say that I *maintain* Erlang on such a range of machines,
> only that this is (a subset of) the range of machines available to
> me.  The software that I am personally developing, I *do* port between
> those systems (and also Cygwin, but we were talking about Unix
> distributions).
>
> In the third-year software engineering class this year, only 1/4 of
> the groups managed to develop software that ported from Linux to Linux.
> One of the *major* issues was 32-bit vs 64-bit.  People will tell you
> that oh, it's no problem, you can run 32-bit programs on 64-bit
> operating systems; what they _don't_ tell you is that this only works
> if *all* the required 32-bit .so files are present, and no, sometimes
> they are not.
>
>> and I wasn't aware that it was so. My expectations
>> were set by distribution of Python, Java, where the latest/greatest (&
>> older) versions are available for most commonly used OS's... the
>> mainstream Linux distros, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows etc.
>
> OK, let's try a specific example: JDK 7.
> http://dlc.sun.com.edgesuite.net/jdk7/binaries/index.html
>
> What do we find?
>        Windows intel 32-bit
>        Windows intel 64-bit
>        Solaris SPARC 32-bit (presumably s10)
>        Solaris SPARC 64-bit (presumably s10)
>        Solaris intel 32-bit (will it work under OpenSolaris?)
>        Solaris intel 64-bit (will it work under OpenSolaris?)
>        Linux   intel 32-bit
>        Linux   intel 64-bit
> Do we find any version of Mac OS X?
> Do we find any version of *BSD?
> Do we find anything other than intel or SPARC (and would we find
> SPARC if Sun/Oracle didn't make SPARC systems)?
> No.
>
> Let's try another one.  Let's make it a functional programming
> language that has been used to do exciting web-related stuff.
> http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/Download_Clean
>
> What do we find?
>        Windows intel 32-bit
>        Windows intel 64-bit
>        Linux   intel 32-bit  (no IDE)
>        Linux   intel 64-bit  (no IDE)
>        MacOS   PPC   32-bit
> Do we find any version for SPARC?  No.  (A long time ago...)
> Do we find any version for Solaris?  No.
> Do we find any version for *BSD?  No.
> Do we find any version for Mac OS X?  No.
> ("MacOS" above appears to mean MacOS 9.)
> When we download the "Windows and Mac complete sources",
> do we find any instructions about how to build the thing?
> Not that either.
>
> It turns out that instructions for building on Mac OS X
> *are* available on the Wiki for that project, since last
> month, but they are not complete, and the process
> (install a different version of gas, install another
> program to convert gas output to something the operating
> system understands, apply a lot of patches, manually
> visit one directory after another, section "TO DO",
> ..., building the compiler "TO DO", ... ...
> installing "TO DO") unpleasant.
>
> Erlang is a *dream* to install by contrast.

Point taken. I rest my case.