[TUHS] A Reiser tour de force
Jon Steinhart
jon at fourwinds.com
Sat Apr 2 07:43:14 AEST 2022
Steffen Nurpmeso writes:
> Jon Steinhart wrote in
> <202204011726.231HQFm03349496 at darkstar.fourwinds.com>:
> |David Barto writes:
> |>> On Apr 1, 2022, at 8:59 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.e\
> |>> du> wrote:
> |>> The recent discussion about Research choosing BSD's paging over
> |>> Reiser-London's brought to mind a stunning program by Reiser that
> |>> Research did adopt.
> |>>
> |>> A critical primitive in the Blit terminal was bitblt (block transfer
> |>> of a rectangular area). It was used ubiquitously, for example to
> ...
> |>> Bitblt got refined (i.e. elaborated) several times before Reiser did
> |>> away with it entirely. Instead he wrote a just-in-time generator of
> |>> optimal code. Thousands of distinct variants, which varied in size
> |>> from 16 to 72 bytes, could be produced by the same 400 lines of
> |>> assembler code.
> ...
> |> Does this exist for the rest of us to study?
> ...
> |It's not insanely complicated by modern standards. Without any knowledge
> |of other work, I did the same thing for a 68020 based graphics system where
> |the JIT code went into the I-cache and was amazingly fast for its day.
> |
> |If I remember correctly, things started with an outer-loop test to see
> |if there were overlapping regions to determine whether to go forward
> |to backwards to avoid having the destination trash the source.
> ...
>
> Only to add that "modern standard" C libraries define
> "overlapping" by means of exclusivity, meaning that memcpy(x,
> &x[1], 1) is an invalid overlapping that requires memmove() to be
> used.
Uh, yeah, but not relevant at least to the code I did which was written
in C but generated machine code, not calls to library functions.
More information about the TUHS
mailing list