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.

Wired