Originally Posted by
ORAC
But the core software runs on PowerPC chips, which have been abandoned by Apple in the commercial market and losing out to ARM chips elsewhere. Which means, at some stage, the core hardware will need replacing with an alternate more advanced type of chip - and the core software rewritten with a new OS - making the use of the middleware at best a temporary solution.
Apple was a small player in the PowerPC world and were just about the only ones using it for desktop machines. The embedded market, servers and consoles are where PowerPC chips are most used. Every Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii has a PowerPC CPU inside, and the next generations of these consoles will probably use them too.
If the LM middleware is similar to Java or .NET, then it is entirely possible to swap out the underlying hardware and OS with only minimal impact on the software running on top. Nothing with software is ever perfect, but it shouldn't require a massive re-write for every upgrade. And 24 million lines of code is not uncommon anymore. Windows passed that mark with the release of Windows 2000, which ran on multiple hardware platforms.