On 20/05/2017 19:37, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 4:11 AM, bartc <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
(Which is exactly what I strive to do. Although my projects are small, they
could still involve dozens of source and support files, and require running
non-standard tools to build, which would then require other sets of sources
to built those.
Dozens? Oh you poor wee lamb.
rosuav@sikorsky:~/cpython$ find -name \*.c -or -name \*.h | wc -l
672
rosuav@sikorsky:~/pike$ find -name \*.c -or -name \*.h | wc -l
701
rosuav@sikorsky:~/wine$ find -name \*.c -or -name \*.h | wc -l
3981
rosuav@sikorsky:~/linux$ find -name \*.c -or -name \*.h | wc -l
44546
This is rather fascinating actually.
Of those remarks I quoted it said that VS/Cmake took 17 minutes to do
something instead of 2 minutes, or 1 second to check something instead
of 20 seconds. What /I/ would like to know is, what is VS/Cmake *doing*
in those extra 15 minutes, or the extra 19 seconds.
I would say there are two types of people: those who care about the
answer, and those who don't.
And similarly, I'd quite like to know what all those 44546 files are
for. I remember that Debian on Raspberry Pi reported there were 55,000
files installed, yet every time you wanted to actually DO anything, you
needed a sudo apt-get install!
There is some skill involved I think in keeping things small and
manageable and at a human scale. I think that's largely been lost.
These repositories, by the way, correspond to git URLs
https://github.com/python/cpython,
git://pike-git.lysator.liu.se/pike.git,
git://source.winehq.org/git/wine, and
https://github.com/torvalds/linux respectively, if you want to check
my numbers. Two language interpreters, a popular execution subsystem,
and an OS kernel.
I'd like to see you create a single-file version of the Linux kernel
that compiles flawlessly on any modern compiler and has no configure
script.
I've written plenty of code to talk to the sort of hardware that I
assume OSes are still largely concerned with. Those drivers were tiny;
what's happened to make them so huge?
(Applications I wrote in the 80s had to DIRECTLY deal with colour
graphics, pointing devices, fonts, printers and plotters. With multiple
drivers for each graphics card, printer etc. /And/ emulate floating
point. /And/ emulate virtual memory that swapped itself to disk. The OS
only took care of the keyboard, and the file system. Yet, the entire
application was STILL tiny!)
BTW /does/ Linux compile on /any/ modern compiler? I heard it was so
difficult to compile that gcc had to be specially modified to make it
possible.
Good, you do that. That fits in the same sort of puzzle space as
building a Turing tarpit. Meanwhile, the rest of us are actually doing
useful things with our lives.
Trying to keep the world simple isn't useful? Someone has to keep tabs
on such things before technology grinds to a halt under the weight of
all the software.
--
bartc
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