At 21:22 Uhr +0100 9.3.2001, Lee Reynolds wrote:
>I'd be willing to bet that many
>people are using PC's to do work on the ports to other
>platforms.

Sure; and many are not. Generally, peecee hardware sucks.

>The availability of cross compilers and
>the massive speed difference between even a PII-233
>and a Quadra 800 or an Amiga 3000 provides good reason
>to do your coding and compiling on the PC and actual
>testing of that code on the Quadra or Amiga.

Have you actually coded stuff yourself? I don't know about other people,
but for me, with serious stuff, the bottleneck sits in front of the screen.
Sure, XEmacs is slower on a Q700 than on a PII/400, but not by an order of
magnitude, and definitely not unbearably so.

>If someone's actually using a Quadra 800 to develop
>NetBSD, then they're taking some extra long coffee
>breaks waiting for things to compile.

No.

>I've recompiled
>the 1.4.3 kernel on a Quadra 700 with 20 megs of
>memory, it took all day.  My Linux kernel compile on
>my PII-333 with 128 megs takes maybe fifteen minutes.

When you develop (kernel) stuff, you work on a few files (at most) at at
time. With, say, a Quadra 700, turnaround times for kernel development are
not that bad.

With the boxes so cheap (and smaller than your average PeeCee, and quicker
in booting) you can just as well keep a second box around, test-boot the
freshly-created kernel from am Netatalk share, and so avoid having to shut
down your X11 sessions.

	hauke

--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)