Originally started by Kevin Lawton, the bochs project – whose motto is “Think inside the bochs” – maintains the bochs emulator. Bochs aims to emulate – at a reasonable speed and with a fair degree of accuracy – an x86-based 32-bit PC with the AMD 64-bit extensions. It can run most operating systems inside it (as “guest operating systems”, if you prefer the VMWare term), such as Windows (3.1, 95, Vista…), Linux, Minix or one of the BSDs. (They even collect disk images as well). In addition, Bochs also runs on loads of operating systems as well – Windows, BeOS, OSX, Irix, Solaris… (more…)

Is either of them irrelevant to this blog? .Net looks irrelevant, Java doesn’t.

Before you think I’m an anti-Microsoft stormtrooper, I’d like to explain why.

Java works by using bytecode. It’s interpreted (or, more likely, converted into native machine code by the Java Runtime Environment) as being machine code targeted to a specific design of machine: a particular non-existent (well, when it was invented, anyway) processor and hardware set designed by one of Sun’s best cowboys, James Gosling.

.Net, however, works more like the GNU compiler collection, where everything is compiled to an intermediate language, that is kind of a meta assembler language which works on any processor. There is, actually, precedence for this – the famous Spectrum game Pyjamarama was written that way, and the programmer went on to create TeeOS around the same idea.

So, to come back to why Java is relevant and .Net isn’t, here’s the bottom line: Java is emulated, .Net is compiled.

Except that I also plan to write about obscure programming languages as well. So I suppose .Net, being a compiler inside, is relevant on those grounds.

One all.