Tue 2003-01-28 09:01, Mike Luther (1:117/3001) wrote to Peter Knapper:

 > What do you know about the utility that existed (s?) for making Family 
 > Mode applications with the VP21 compiler?

"OS/2 1.x has one interesting feature - it allowed developers to build
"family mode" applications that could run unchanged on DOS as
well as OS/2 - note that this was not the same as "bound" apps
which essentially contain separate executables for DOS and OS/2. The Family
API was a subset of OS/2 API. A family app was an OS/2 program (a NE format
executable) which ran on OS/2 without any special considerations. But the
DOS stub was unusually large (about 11K) and contained a miniature OS/2 API
"emulator" that ran on top of DOS. Many OS/2 commands used this
feature as well as some Microsoft programming tools (linker, librarian
etc.)."

- http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0801H/vnewsf4.htm

This isn't possible with OS/2 2.x (32-bit) executables.  You need to
generate a bound executable instead, which basically means two entirely
different executable images in the one .exe file.  I don't think it's
possible to bind 32-bit OS/2 and 32-bit Windows executables though.  In any
case, this tends to cause more support problems than is worth the effort,
and just complicates the build procedure.

 > If it is such an easy thing to do, then what really is the problem in 
 > providing a run-time sniffer during this project which could offer a 
 > UNIVERSAL version of MAX from which one can run it on OS/2 - WIN - 
 > LINUX at will.  It would gain attention I bet.

It's technically impossible for the same executable to natively run under
Windows and Linux because of (1) file format issues and (2) architecture
issues. In particular, Linux uses the "ELF" format and
DOS/OS2/Windows do not.  Also, Linux runs on non-Intel platforms, eg. my
Apple PowerPC runs MkLinux.  For this reason Linux (and FreeBSD, OpenBSD,
etc.) users should generally be encouraged to compile from source, where
practical, because it can be either impractical or impossible to provide
binaries for all supported platforms.

-- mail{at}ozzmosis.com

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