[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Wed Jun 27 07:50:12 AEST 2018
On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 05:16:56PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>
>
> On 6/26/2018 3:01 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> >I???m not sure I buy his arguments.
> I was going to say it was total and complete BS, at least based on the
> quoted statement in the initial email. But I decided not to send it. ;)
>
> I wrote a POSIX thread based queuing system a few years back that could
> handle thousands of threads on a dual processor SPARC-10 before it just
> completely locked up Solaris (I think 9). It was targeted at larger systems,
> and it could easily scale as far as I wanted it to.
>
> While you could argue that pthreads are not "C", the language was quite
> happy doing what I asked of it.
So I agree, had the same initial reaction. But I read the paper a
second time and the point about Fortran, all these years later, still
being a thing resonated. The hardware guys stand on their heads to
give us coherent caches.
> Sometimes, I wonder... Programmers are supposed to be smarter than the
> language. Not the other way around.
That's a great quote. But I do sort of grudgingly see the author's
point of view, at least somewhat.
--lm
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