[TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Sun May 7 01:53:44 AEST 2017


On Sat, May 06, 2017 at 03:51:24PM +0000, Michael Kj??rling wrote:
> On 6 May 2017 08:24 -0700, from lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy):
> >> I would absolutely not say that doing something like that is standard
> >> practice in modern programming. Even in microcontrollers, where
> >> program and data memory can be scarce even today, I would argue that
> >> the costs would not outweigh the benefits by a long shot.
> > 
> > It strikes as being similar to Duff's device (1).  Which is a niche thing
> > but I still use that from time to time.  Not to save memory, just because
> > as a C programmer it seems pretty natural to do it.
> > 
> > --lm
> > 
> > (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff's_device
> 
> I disagree; loop unrolling and jumping to the beginning of some
> instruction inside that unrolled loop is not at all the same thing as
> jumping _into the middle of a machine language instruction_.

That's fine, I feel no need to argue about it.  Seemed similar to me but
I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed :)



More information about the TUHS mailing list