Start-up Echo Logic Inc, the Bell Laboratories spin-off being funded by AT&T Ventures Corp, the phone company’s venture arm, last week announced its agreement with Apple Computer Inc that it’s apparently had in its back pocket for over a year. The pair are planning to use Echo’s multi-pass binary compiler technology, FlashPort, to enable existing shrinkwrapped Macintosh applications to run on Apple’s forthcoming PowerPC RISC-based boxes when they reach market. Echo president Brad Burnham claims that Apple has expressed an unpursued interest in taking an equity position in Echo. The product itself won’t be generally available before the second quarter 1993, although limited numbers of alpha test editions will hit software developers, its key market, later this year. Burnham mysteriously alluded to the architecture before the PowerPC version comes to market. He was not specific and appeared to have no other projects in hand. He denied having any solid relationship with Unix System Laboratories Inc, a fellow AT&T company, despite the fact that Unix Labs is said to be working on an Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format-style extension for its Destiny project as well as being determined to evaluate the Open Software Foundation’s own ANDF selection. It is believed the internal ANDF-style technology Unix Labs has claimed to have may in fact be Echo Logic’s product, which it may be evaluating. As a Destiny product, FlashPort’s state of readiness may be more important than to Apple. Burnham said that FlashPort needed a lot of improvement tightening up integration, size, the speed of generated code, degree of automation and documentation.
Toughest nut to crack
It is, however, considered out of the research phase. The Apple deal is said to have came about because Echo used the Mac, theoretically the toughest nut to crack, as its proof of concept and showed the system to Apple last year, translating Macintosh programs to run on several unidentified RISC systems. Burnham described FlashPort as a beefy, sophisticated and complex piece of software suitable for use by a senior engineer. However Echo is promising to reduce conversion time to a matter of days, or at worst weeks, lopping off what could be years of development time in moving from one architecture to another. The time saved could be spent adding features like speech recognition that are only possible on a more advanced system such as PowerPC. Echo claimes to circumvent the problem of trespassing on Apple’s jealously-guarded ToolBox by not needing it anywhere but on the target machine, which in this case Apple will provide. Meanwhile Echo says it has Apple’s permission to use the ToolBox for demonstration purposes. Echo still needs the connivance of an Apple to guarantee that it stays in sync with all system call releases. Echo says FlashPort, which translates executable object code, will generate an application for a PowerPC intervention regardless of language, which can even be assembly language. The results should be competitive with hand-converted code in performance and size. Echo has been working on the technology for three years with a variety of minicomputer architectures. It developed three algorithms that automatically analyse the program’s machine code, create an intermediate architecture-neutral representation of the program and shift executable code to the new environment. A user interface is said to enable a developer to intervene at any stage in the translation. Burnham, at a Macintosh Developers Conference last week, declined to say what FlashPoint’s licence fees would be, indicating they could vary depending on the developer’s particular circumstances and desperation. Developers could use the tool in-house, at the expense of buying a target machine, currently an RS/6000, or have Echo do it as a service. Royalties are an issue Echo has apparently not resolved. Echo was unclear whether the programs shifted over were System 7- or System 6-based.
