[TUHS] B Source Code

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Thu Sep 14 23:39:13 AEST 2017


    > From: Alec Muffett

    > "threaded code" in the old sense could be smaller than the equivalent
    > CISC binary on the same machine

One can think of 'threaded code' as code for a new virtual machine, one
specialized to the task at hand.

    > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code

For those who really want to delve in some depth, see the chapter "Turning
Cousins into Sisters" (Chapter 15, pg. 365) in "Computer Engineering: A DEC
View of Hardware Systems Design", by Bell, Mudge and McNamara.

Interesting factoid: The PDP-11 initially used a threaded FORTRAN
implementation. In line with the observation above (about a new virtual
machine), DEC actually looked into writing microcode for the -11/60 (which had
a writeable control store) to implement the FORTRAN virtual machine.

	Noel



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