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Silicon Valley Startup Claims Universal Software Emulator

by , 7:00 PM EDT, September 13th, 2004

According to an article at Wired, a Silicon Valley startup called Transitive Corporation claims to have written an emulator which can run an application written for any platform on another platform (for example, a Windows application on a Mac) with almost no hit in performance. The company claims that this software will eliminate the need to port applications, even saying that the application will allow current x86-based Microsoft Xbox titles to run on the next generation PPC-based Xbox. From Wired:

A Silicon Valley startup claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit.

Transitive Corp. of Los Gatos, California, claims its QuickTransit software allows applications to run "transparently" on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes.

"This opens up a whole new world of things you can do, because previously software was tied to (a) particular processor," said president and CEO Bob Wiederhold. "It gives you access to a much greater diversity of software."

The company claimed QuickTransit eliminates the need to port software from one platform to another. Software applications written for one platform will run on almost any other, without any modifications to the underlying program.

You can read the full article at Wired's site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

This is an extremely interesting development in the world of software development, and one that could have both negative and positive effects on the Mac platform.

Before we address that, however, let's look at some more immediate, practical issues. The first is that we have not seen this software at work ourselves. The second is that both of the demonstrations mentioned in Wired's article could have been faked, so to speak. Linux is available for the Mac, for instance, and both a port of GIMP and several X11 implementations exist for Windows.

That said, if this company's software can do what they say it can do, then it is indeed an impressive feat. Anyone who has used Virtual PC knows that the processor tax of running an entire OS through emulation can make running some software just about impossible. Being able to run the software without emulating the entire OS could be a whole other matter.

That ability, however, could be both a good and bad thing for the Mac platform. On the good side is being able to run any software you want. That's obviously great. On the potentially negative side is the fact that this same ability could greatly discourage native Mac development.

This is the argument that has long been made against products like Virtual PC, however, and the reality is that it just hasn't been the case. There is an ever-growing Mac OS X developer community today, and the software available to Mac users is most likely broader than it has been in the last 7-8 years.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
View Name:Guest
Subject: My understanding
Close Name:Icantdecideonausername Posts: 10 Joined: 18 Aug 2004
Subject:

Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware

Close Name:AFCdtLoeb Posts: 2533 Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Subject:

Wait, does this mean WinDell users can run iLife? Beacuse then we are screwed.

Close Name:fultonkbd Posts: 121 Joined: 02 Mar 2004
Subject: I agree

Yeah - I have to agree - vaporware. These guys aren't they same people that ran FWB awhile back, are they? I'll believe it when I see it.

On the other hand. If it's true, some interesting things could happen in our current computer world. Buying hardware just on looks and not worrying about software compatibility could play right in Apple ideology.

Close Name:macslut Posts: 60 Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Subject: Move on, nothing to see here (ever)

Why do publishers let their reporters cover this crap? This story pops up about as often as message 419 (the Nigerian email scam). Publishers should offer this story as a press release and then fire any editors they have that don't have their BS detecters going off.

View Name:Guest
Subject: OSX runs faster than your wildest dreams..
View Name:Guest
Subject: If it works...
View Name:Guest
Subject: Sounds legit to me.
View Name:Guest
Subject: Windows References Where?
Close Name:Jonovitch Posts: 19 Joined: 06 May 2004
Subject: **WARNING SIGN!!**

The second quote on Transitive's press release (http://www.transitive.com/news_quicktransit.htm) is from our old pal Rob Enderle. He is one of many "analysts" quoted on the page. I don't know what this means, but any time I see Enderle quoted, I swallow a big chunk of salt before I read further. Just some food for thought.

Jon

Close Name:Biff Posts: 1479 Joined: 08 Apr 2004
Subject: YIPPEE!!!!

Wow apparently these guys have managed to violate the fundamental properties of how our computers work and create something that pretty much could not work the way they claim. But hey at least they've gotten a lot of publicity. If I'm not mistaken they have also developed a new type of gasoline that will allow any existing car to reach its destination by opening a rip in space/time. No mechanical changes are needed! Also I'm pretty sure these guys are gonna be shipping Duke Nukem Forever to stores for the busy 2004 Holiday season!

Close Name:fartheststar Posts: 213 Joined: 04 Jan 2004
Subject: OSX - OS of choice

If this happened, Apple would have to focus on the "gadgets" (iPod) and the Software (OS X). OSX would stand a great chance to be the OS of choice, if you took their proprietary hardware out of the equasion. Sure, you could still buy the cute hardware (probably at a premium), but you wouldn't have to. I would love to have spent less on the hardware and had the same experience as I have on my mac. In today's world, that's not possible, and I am happy with every penny I spent.

I know some PC's are literally made of garbage, your "AMD/Intel" machine for OSX probably would have to have 'certified OSX parts' in it (minimum system requirements, brands, quality (ie - apple could sell the "OSX approved" logo to hardware makers....

OSX would probably become the standard, because it's easier to use than windows and it wouldn't require special hardware anymore. But by the way, there would continue to be developpers for it because it would become the standard and because you'd want to buy software that was OSX approved.

But... this emulator... it'll happen someday, but not today. I don't believe it at all.

Close Name:kenaustus Posts: 601 Joined: 27 Jun 2003
Subject: Not that happy

Some hacker will figure out a way to get a Windows virus/worm into a Mac using this little bit of software. Aggghhh!

Close Name:kenaustus Posts: 601 Joined: 27 Jun 2003
Subject: Not that happy

Some hacker will figure out a way to get a Windows virus/worm into a Mac using this little bit of software. Aggghhh!

View Name:Guest
Subject:
View Name:Guest
Subject: Here's another company that was going to revolutionize
View Name:Guest
Subject: Toto too, I mean Transmeta, say who?
View Name:Guest
Subject: You folks are absolutely on crack.
View Name:Guest
Subject:
Close Name:acdc1174 Posts: 677 Joined: 16 Apr 2004
Subject:

File this right next to cold fusion...

Close Name:Elmar Posts: 100 Joined: 20 Feb 2002
Subject: There is no Windows support!

A closer look to their web site reveales that they support only Unix/Linux-like operating systems and there is even no mention of MacOS X. I guess it should be relatively easy with their technology to let any Unix based program run on MacOS X but to support the other way round would be much harder for them. Support for Windows based programs might be never available, at least not in the near future.

With those limitations their product becomes much more realistic and is probably not just vaporware. For the Mac it could be an easy way to have access to all variations of Unix/Linux-based applications without the need of recompilations, but we will still have to rely on MS to bring MS Office to the Mac or to use products like VirtualPC

Close Name:geoduck Posts: 1721 Joined: 30 Dec 2003
Subject:

What's that old saw about any deal that looks too good to be real isn't...

I'll believe it when I see a box on the shelf at my local Apple Store.

View Name:Guest
Subject: IF it worked...
View Name:Guest
Subject: How about those colonies on the moon and Mars.
Close Name:VSeward -   TMO Staff Posts: 971 Joined: 28 Jun 2001
Subject: Ummmm....

Quote
acdc1174 wrote:
File this right next to cold fusion...


I actually believe cold fusion works. I don't believe this software works as advertised, but cold fusion, yeah!

View Name:Guest
Subject: Did you say ice cold Bud...
Close Name:geoduck Posts: 1721 Joined: 30 Dec 2003
Subject:

Quote
Quote VSeward
I actually believe cold fusion works. I don't believe this software works as advertised, but cold fusion, yeah!



That's why DOD is funding low level research into cold fusion. It just might work to some degree. I ran across a story about that a couple of weeks ago.

Close Name:acdc1174 Posts: 677 Joined: 16 Apr 2004
Subject:

Well, cold fusion might "kinda work", much like this program "kinda works". I thik we are more likely to see cold fusion first though.

View Name:Guest
Subject: cold fusion
Close Name:Nom Posts: 58 Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Subject:

Note the fine details. Most importantly, this thing isn't an instruction level interpreter / emulator. They actually perform offline anaylsis and compilation of the code and recompile it into an alternative representation. It seems to be somewhat similar to an optimising assembler, except the optimisation transforms the code to a different platform.

Obviously, there will be some efficiency loss. Beyond that, the translation code is going to need to be very careful about how it deals with endianness, interrupts, memory accesses, function pointers and peripheral interaction, all of which can be very different across architectures. There's also a question of whether the translator is smart enough to recognise "oh, that's callback X to a USB driver; let's swap in the native call" without messing up other code.

But viewed correctly, it's not a fundamentally intractable problem, just a very difficult one to get right.

Close Name:Biff Posts: 1479 Joined: 08 Apr 2004
Subject: Still Bull!

Quote
Nom wrote:
Note the fine details..

...But viewed correctly, it's not a fundamentally intractable problem, just a very difficult one to get right.
Ignoring the fact that what you just described will never work very well, the fact remains that even if it did, it is simply NOT a solution to the problem they pose in the article. It would take years of work to get something that would accurately translate from one architecture to one other. Thats hardly "universal". And what about running some Windows App on my Mac? So the app is translated in PPC byte code. What about the Win32 subsystem and common dlls that the app needs in order to run? Do I have to recompile Windows? Yeah thats gonna work real well! These guys wanted publicity and they got it. But they will be forgotten just as quickly.

Close Name:Uruz1 Posts: 1 Joined: 17 Sep 2004
Subject: Hmmm.

It's a GREAT idea. But I doubt it would work (if it exists) as people might think. A program must be compiled. And even a piece of thinware that would allow the compiled program to run cross-platform would have to emulate the entire OS for the compiled app to truly work properly. For instance, You might be able to buy the less expensive Mac OS X version of MS Office so you could run it on your Windows machine, but how will your printer driver handle your Word docs?

This is one example of many, many intense and difficult programming issues related to making applications run "seamlessly" even on the OSes for which they are intentionally programmed. I tend to think that attempting to make those applications work on foreign platforms with foreign hardware and third-party peripherals with mere software would be folly, and that announcing such a program is much worse than that.

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