According to Charles M. Hannum:
> Thanks for the reference.  While this paper shows that NetBSD (1.0) is
> faster in most tests than Windows and Windows NT, it does show places
> that could use more optimization.
> 
> Of course, being geared toward performance benchmarking, the article
> doesn't mention some of the strong points of NetBSD: portability, much
> cleaner abstraction barriers, binary compatibility with other
> operating systems, and the simple fact that it's free, and anyone can
> hack on it.

this binary compatibility thing..  something that I found a while ago
was a paper by a french guy (I think) about something he called Semantic
Dictionary Encoding - basically, it is code generation at load time,
the compiler or whatever just creates a description of the algorithm
and the loader generates the code on the fly as it loads..  he had it
working on a Modula-2/Mac system and it seemed to give *faster* loading
times (the `executables' were much smaller..) than equivalent compiled
programs..  another advantage is of course, that the `executable' files
really are binary compatible across the range..  I have no doubt that
this would be an incredible amount of work to implement in NetBSD, but
would it be a desirable aim?   I seem to have lost the reference by now
too, but I could probably hunt it down if anybody was interested..

]ain