Multi-architecture, theory versus practise

"As I said before, even if FatELF could simplify deployment (at the expense of increasing exponentially the complexity of any other part of the operating system that deals with executables and libraries), it does nothing to solve a much more important problem, that has to be solved before you can even think of achieve multi-architecture support from vendors: development.

"Now, in theory it's pretty easy to write multi-architecture code: you make no use of any machine-dependent feature, no inline assembly, no function call outside the scope of a standard. But is it possible for sophisticated code to keep this way? It certainly often is not for open source software, even when it already supports multiple architecture and multiple software platforms as well. You can find that even OpenOffice require a not-so-trivial porting to support Linux/HPPA and that's a piece of software that, while deriving from a proprietary suite (and having been handled by Sun which is quite well known for messy build systems), has been heavily hacked at by a large community of developers, and includes already stable support for 64-bit architectures."

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