Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 347 from 2003/10/12
From: 1 AU, EU, DE/HU
Quote:
Seems like Qbox is going to be the "native" MorphOS.
That's right, but since MOS is done by Amiga programmers, who actually like Amiga-style API-s, and Amiga way of thinking, i don't expect that it will be very different from current (Amiga-originated) API-s.
It will drop backward compatibility to implement features which cannot be done with standard Amiga API, like memory protection, better threading, using 2GB+ files, longer filenames(?), and so on. I expect there will be a lot of things which will remain the same (eg. MUI, CGFX, AHI, way to load libraries/devices, general style of the API eg. using Tags, SYSV ABI, etc.).
About this "box stuff", this is not like a virtual machine on most OS-es used to provide backward compatibility (eg. V86 mode on x86) but simply a sign, which API-kit an application uses. If you use ABox API, you can't use advanced MOS features, and if you (will) use QBox API, you'll drop backward compatibility. So you can't use this feature to run other OS-es in a virtual environment. It's just about the API an application use. Much like you can use Win3.1 API-s on Win2003 (bad example i know
) but better use the newer ones.
From the user point of view, the slow transition from the ABox API to QBox API is invisible, this is somewhat only programmers need to care about.
However, this is pure speculation on my side.
