When Cosm was born in 1995, there were hundreds of platforms (combinations of CPU and OS) to choose from. IRIX, OS/2, SunOS, NeXTStep, MacOS 9, Windows 95 and dozens more. But most of those have passed away, and all of them were orders of magnitude slower than a modern smartphone. Cosm supported a large number of platforms, each loved in its own way, but going forward Cosm will focus on the platforms that are in common use today.
Operating Systems: Win32, Win64, Linux, Android, OS X, iOS. Endangered species: Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD.
Host CPUs: x86, x64, ARM, ARM64, MIPS, MIPS64. Endangered species: PPC, PPC64.
Extensions like x86 SSE, ARM vector units, and OpenCL are handled through the accelerator framework, and run in or with a host CPU that detects them at run time.
Our Compile Farm – Platforms that Cosm is tested on regularly:
- Windows: Win32-x86, Win64-x64.
- Linux: Linux-x86, Linux-x64 (Amazon EC2), Linux-ARM (Raspberry Pi).
- OS X: OSX-x86, OSX-x64, OSX-PPC (G4 MacBook).
- Android: Android-ARM (Nexus 7), Android-MIPS, Android-x86.
- iOS: iOS-ARM (iPhone 4s & iPad).
- Clouds: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (where available).
The platforms will continue to evolve as they have since 1995. Porting the CPU/OS layer to a new platform has always been a quick process, so adding new platforms in the future will never be a problem. Any software using Cosm can build and run on 99.9%+ of the devices people use today including phones, tablets, desktops, servers, and clouds.
