From: bernd@iamk4515.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de (Bernd Wiebelt) Subject: Re: NT vs Linux (was: Re: truth or dare) Date: 9 Jul 1993 17:48:09 GMT
Bob Bagwill (bagwill@swe.ncsl.nist.gov) wrote:
: Parental Advisory (meshkin@sol.cs.wmich.edu) wrote:
: : One of the things that has irritated me for quite some time is all the
: : theory people telling us how we have to make our code more "generic",
: : "reusable" and "modular".
: : ...
: : Does anyone out there remember the kinds of things that used to be
: : accomplished back in the days of the Commodore 64, Apple ][, etc?
: : Remember when we only had 64K in the whole machine? Remember when
: : a processor ran at a whopping 1MHz? Anyone remember 88K floppies?
: : ...
: : but I can also write a super-inefficient implementation of that heap
: : sort which WILL fail to beat a nice quick assembly bubble sort.
: Jeez Loueez! Not another unstructured self-modifying micro-optimized
: assembler bigot. Program in microcode why dontcha! :-)
: Notice that those machines are pretty much extinct. Crafty, crufty,
: assembler only take you so far. To get the smallest fastest kernel for
: a particular purpose, you need more modular code, not less. You can't
: remove or replace the graphics code, for example, if it's written in
: assembler and intimately intertwined with all the rest of the kernel.
: What I think most users want is a super-easy to install, configure, and
: maintain Linux. No programs that randomly coredump. No logfiles that
: grow to infinity. If you want to change the name of your system, how
: many files do you have to edit? If I want to create a single purpose
: system (like a gopher server), how easy is it to configure?
Well Bob, it seems to me you missed the point. I don't think
anyone would like to program a big software package entirely
in assembler these days. This time is long long gone (in terms
of computer evolution).
There is no reason however, why operating systems should not
be optimized, and be it while sacrifycing modularity/high-levelness.
If it can be optimized easy by hacking in some inline-assembly
then why not do it? Can you and I really afford to buy a
new DEC-ALPHA machine for over, well I don't really know but
it is far beyond my budget. Can we afford it just to run
Windows NT at half the speed that Linux runs on a simple 486/33???
Well time may come when you are right. At the moment, IMHO, you
are not.
Greetings, Bernd