Re: [OpenBIOS] Beginners How-To for DTS and OpenFirmware?

[Tarl Neustaedter]

On 2016-Nov-22 09:22 , Artyom Tarasenko wrote:
> That's a very interesting point. Does EFI actually have any advantages
> over IEEE 1275?

* It's supported by Intel and many hardware vendors (drivers for their
    chips)
  * It has huge libraries to do many interesting things (from IPv6 to
    debuggers), so system builders have many options that don't require
    writing things from scratch.
  * It's written in C.

At one point, I was informed that the biggest advantage was that it
didn't require Forth programmers. From a management viewpoint, that is
significant, finding good Forth programmers is a pain in the tush.
Growing your own forth programmers isn't easy, it takes a long time for
someone to learn how to write clean and maintainable Forth. And with
today's larger PROMs, Forth's compactness is no longer as important.
> For instance, Apple moved to EFI, but was their real motivation?
> Did they just wanted to ditch Forth?

I have no actual visibility into Apple's motivations, but my assumption
would be that with the move to x86, the change to EFI made sense to them.