Andrew Cagney wrote:
To me, more interesting than distributing a fat (or pre-compiled for everything) binary would be distributing JIT binaries - the target machine can then either interpret or compile the files in a way that exploits all the features of the target. For instance on x86 systems being able to use SSE registers as part of the ABI improves its fp performance. This ability is one of the ideas behind compiler projects such as llvm.org.
I think you raised this opinion a few years ago. I like the idea too, since it also follows the concept of "compile once, run anywhere"; something I think that fat binaries can (almost) provide with minimal effort.
Do you have any more ideas about this? A quick look on wikipedia didn't reveal anything that would permit a "proof of concept" to be implemented quickly. Given that NetBSD in written in C, bytecode which could represent the C language seems like an obvious starting place.