On 7/19/06, Anselm R. Garbe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Why is there no hope for writing a compiler in less than ten thousand lines? Maybe because modern compilers need to provide so much optimization features, that the complex software they have to compile don't performs poorly?
Actually, the reason modern compilers provide so much optimization is because the target language no longer matches the instruction set of the underlying machine. The constructs in C correspond fairly closely to the machine instructions of a PDP-11, but not so much to to x86, arm, power, etc. A lot of the complexity lies in mapping new machine instructions and architecture to a 30 year old close-to-metal language.
See the Web Service desease for example. Do I need an XML parser in the future to call atoi()?
You'll get no argument from me here, the web services mess is a prime example of group design and abstraction astronautics.
I doubt that I can do fewer data abstraction with C than with any other language. What can't I do with C, but with another language?
I won't argue possible, as most modern languages are Turing-complete, but I will argue convenience. C lacks Erlang's concurrency primitives, Ruby's blocks, Lisp's macros, Python's stdlib, Fortran's array support, Perl's text-fu, etc etc etc. Don't get me wrong, C is a very fine language for implementing operating systems and other such plumbing due to it's speed and bit-twiddling abilities, but it's not the last word in language design.
Do you really believe you can understand software systems consisting of more than 10kloc?
I'll confess that I don't know everything that's going on in the stack underneath my 200 lines of javascript or 4k lines of python, but as long as everything works the way it should, I don't have to. I don't code to make code, I code to make something that works. I do believe that you're a better programmer than I am (more experience, more sloc, more consistent), but I've never understood your obsession with optimization. So much programming effort wasted on getting stuff to run imperceptably faster. I'm all for having beautifully structured, succinct, lucid code but computing resources exist to be consumed so why not consume them? _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://wmii.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wmii
