News: A near-universal software emulator?

Transitive, a Silicon Valley-based startup, has claimed to have created a near-universal software emulator that "supports software written in any programming language," writes Wired magazine. Notes the article, "The company is initially going after the server and mainframe markets because that's where the money is, but said it will eventually focus on desktop PCs and consumer electronics. It claims QuickTransit will support almost any pairing of processor and operating system [and] allows a foreign application to do everything it does on its native platform, with 100 percent functionality." The emulator also supports 3-D graphics, the article notes. Demos have shown Quake III for Linux running on an Apple Powerbook, and Gimp (a Linux graphics editor) working on a Windows notebook, with no discernable loss in performance. In terms of ease-of-use, it launches automatically when a non-native application is launched. The article discusses the technology behind Quicktransit; it apparently translates blocks of code rather than going line by line, and takes advantage of faster performance of modern computer systems.