Re:ASM is getting too easy :) (Score 2)

First of all, the article contains an error (And it wasn't written by some anonymous person, as someone claimed, but by Daniel Robbins, President/CEO of Gentoo Technologies, Inc.).. The VP code isn't just translated the first time it's run, but at load time. Why?! I hear you ask.. Simple, the VP binaries are smaller than the native and the little overhead from tranlating is won back due to shorted load time. Compiling to native once would also double the diskspace required, as you would have to store both VP and x86 (for example) versions! And in a multiprocessor system, you don't know which processor that will execute each tool (Applications for AmigaDE consists of numerous tools (Small VP code smippets) that are loaded and translated when needed, thus reducing startup time and memory consumption furter) and because the processors might have different architectures (x86, PPC...) you would need one native version for each different processor in your computer.

Regarding the speed issue.. When running hosted (Ontop windos, Linux or other) you'll never achieve full speed, but AmigaDE's also able to run natively, accessing the hardware direclty (Not the software, as it's hardware independant, but the kernel). And in that case I believe it will easily outperform windows (not very hard) and atleast equal other OSes running natively on the same hardware.

I own the early SDK released (Meant to be used for drivers development, so ppl who didn't understand that always complain about it being so unfinished) and with every update there's a noticable performance boost. It's definitely too early to tell what the finished AmigaDE's going to look and feel like, but even the SDK feels snappy and quite powerful (Though mine is hosted on Linux) so personally I think they might have a chance.