On Nov 23, 2017, at 5:19 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>
> They want maximum results for minimum effort? That may be normal, but
> it's still whiney.
If “normal” is “whiney”, it ceases to be a useful disparagement unless you
intend to change society. This mailing list is not a good place to start doing
that; few take social cues from geeks. :)
> It may be easier to implement Git in an SQLite database for the sake of
> comparison.
That should be tried, too. I suspect it will make Git faster, at least up to
repo sizes that fit easily within a single process’s ability to grab hard-wired
RAM, based on the benchmark I pointed you to up-thread.
Interesting point about that benchmark: if you force it to create a DB much
larger than RAM, performance goes in the tank on the SQLite side. And that in
turn may well be materially interesting to this very discussion. Maybe it’s
why Git holds up better under load as repo size grows into the gigs.
>
> You should ask the OpenBSD folk for advise. They have run on super
> unusual systems with compilers that support C99, including the VAX.
VAX != “super unusual.” It was one of the most popular computers of the 1980s,
dominating an entire market segment. Therefore, a lot of software got ported
to it, including recent versions of GCC. A huge hobbyist community still
exists for it, which also helps.
You want unusual, let’s talk about the Intel Paragon, based on the ill-fated
i860 microprocessor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Paragon
I suspect it’s difficult to find a GCC fully supporting C99 on that, yet they
were powerhouses in their day, even grabbing the #1 spot in TOP500 list at one
point:
https://www.top500.org/featured/systems/intel-xps-140-paragon-sandia-national-labs/
Now, let us say that I’m an underfunded government laboratory sharing time on a
third-hand Paragon that is still powered on only because it’s cheaper to pay
the power and cooling bill than buy a new massively parallel supercomputer. Do
I not get to run the latest SQLite now? Do I not get to pull from public
Fossil repos?
> Just some of the features I mentioned would make things a lot easier to
> maintain
[citation needed]
I’m quite serious. Who says C11 is a major factor in the maintainability of C
code, and by what measured factor?
> and provide optimisation opportunities for compilers.
Ditto. I suspect you’re chasing microoptimizations, which might amount to
single-digit percentage speed increases, all in.
Even at today’s far slower single-core speed increase rates, you’ll probably
get all of that performance and more from Intel just in the time it takes to do
the “upgrade.” Why not spend the time elsewhere and let Intel deliver the
goods?
>> I don’t need to do that today, but I’d prefer that you don’t preclude
>> me doing it in the future just because you want to require C11 to
>> compile SQLite and Fossil.
>
> It won't preclude you doing it if you try hard enough. All I am
> proposing here is basic C99 functionality such as postponed variable
> declarations, inline/restrict (maybe), stdint.h/stdbool.h, etc. to make
> the code neater. If your compiler doesn't support some of that stuff,
> #define is your best friend.
You’re going to change a bunch of variables’ locality and you think I can fix
it with a few #defines? I don’t think so.
>> If you are developing software for a company
>> whose marketing department decides that targeting only Windows 8 and
>> 10 is the best decision, then by all means, use C11 or C++14
>> exclusively; you can afford it.
>
> Using C99/C11 doesn't require Windows 8/10 or Linux.
I didn’t say it did. I simply gave an example where those signing the checks
have decided that supporting only the latest platforms is acceptable from a
business standpoint, therefore all of my arguments about legacy architecture
support go out the window.
Wise man say, “God created the world in only 6 days because he didn’t have a
legacy user base to support.”
> I recall
> a presentation by Andrew Tanenbaum (of MINIX fame) mentioning that
> software is becoming slower and larger at a faster rate than hardware
> is increasing in speed and capability. He compares running a word
> processor on the PDP-11 to running MS Office on modern Windows.
That’s rather unfair, since the PDP-11 word processor probably didn’t even
support proportional fonts, much less any appreciable fraction of Word’s
feature set.
Still, I have been dismayed since the 1980s that it still takes 15-90 seconds
to boot a computer to a useful application, just like it did for my Apple ][.
It’s long past time we achieved instant-on.
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