Good news for Linux Port

[jkreef]

I'm sure the dev-team knows this and most of probably do too, but Google's Chrome is based on the Open Source project, Chromium. The dev-team has stated that the only thing other than time stopping them from porting Overgrowth to Linux is the lack of Chrome support. Attached is a screenshot of Chromium running on my Ubuntu Jaunty Linux box. So, Chromium works on Linux and I was wondering if this might be enough to make a porting attempt worth it? Anyway, thought I'd share what I had found.
By the way, this was written in Chromium on Linux.

[Odin]

Is it a stable or a testing release?

I am really looking forward to a Linux compatible version of Overgrowth.

[Jeff]

AJS has been working on a Linux version of Awesomium. Ryan Gordon said he is all ready to port OG when Awesomium is ready to go.

So it shouldn't be too long now.

[jkreef]

Jeff: That'll be incredible. I await any possible port with the greatest of anticipation.
Odin: It seems stable, the rendering is fine, the browser front-end is just incomplete, a few options missing, like an options menu.

[Healey]

No news on PPC yet though? Is that just the matter of chrome supporting PPC?

[jkreef]

I did a quick Google search and it is apparently "easy" to compile chrome for PPCs. Maybe Awesomium is not yet ported to PPC macs, just intel?
I also Googled Awesomium. It's pretty sick looking. I can tell why you guys used it for GUI. Seems far easier to make things for than anything I've seen.

EDIT: Never mind. It is supposedly easy for the Google people to make it work on PPC. Not the end user.

[mimox]

AJS has been working on a Linux version of Awesomium. Ryan Gordon said he is all ready to port OG when Awesomium is ready to go.

So it shouldn't be too long now.

Now that sounds great!

Regarding PPC support... Last thing I heard V8 does not support PPC and adding support for it was still a big "maybe", but wouldn't be considered before Chrome/Mac on Intel was "done"?

[matto1990]

I think the main problem with V8 is that it works by compiling the JavaScript into native machine code. Obviously on Intel chips (that includes AMD) it has a single assembeler instruction set for Windows, Linux and OS X; so it works fine on all of them. PPC has a different instruction set so getting V8 working on PPC means changing that whole section of the V8 engine to work with it; and since the PPC market share is so small it might not be worth it.

The same is true of SquiralFish and SquiralFish Extreme on webkit. SF Extreme has the same sort of native code completion technique as V8 and I believe it only works on Intel machine as well. That's why the iPhone version of safari uses SquialFish (non-extreme), as it runs an ARM cpu which has a different instruction set to Intel chips.

(I think the section about the iphone is correct however I've heard little bits about extreme maybe being around in iPhone OS V3.0 - no idea if it's true though)

Hopefully that clears up why V8 isn't avaliable on PPC - it's no small task to port it over as most of V8's speed comes from the native code generation.