[Coco] The Mark Twain of operating systems...

[gene heskett]

On Wednesday, February 15, 2012 02:10:33 PM Patrick Wilson did opine:

> I dont know if this is what you were refering to or not, i suspect it
> is.   Here are a couple generic links for both ARM and LLVM. 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Level_Virtual_Machine
> http://llvm.org/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
> 
Running a C++ compiler on a coco would to me, be a bit masochistic.  I just 
spent nearly 2 hours last night, downloading the required dependencies to 
build the latest openscam tarball on my milling machines computer which was 
booted such that only one of its 2 core atom cores was available for normal 
use.  Written largely in C++, the compile process was one of first building 
the compiler tools and then compiling the object, a slightly over 5 
megabyte undertaking.

On a 1.8 Ghz atom, this was nearly 2 hours, which may have been worth it 
had the code worked, but typical of C++ pre-alpha stuff, it was dead stable 
but didn't work, at least on that box.

Based on that, if I had written vfy in C++, it would take 2 to 4 hours to 
build it on the coco, and likely wouldn't have been near as fast as the 
assembly version I published.  asm can build it in way less than a minute 
if the listing file is turned off.

Based on that, porting gcc seems like a more productive use of ones time.  
OTOH, with all the extra's that have been written to aid our c compiler, it 
makes decent code, stable code and does it in a quite reasonable amount of 
time.  Yes it has limits, bit fields being the most obvious but I've never 
found that to be a show stopper.

IMO the tools should make the most of the resources they have, and even a 
gcc port to the 6x09 would probably wind up considerably more 'bloated' and 
likely broken up into far more pieces needing to be chained together by 
something like cc2.5.2 to get the job done, similar to what now comprises 
the "full kit" for our c compiler.

Far too many have been burned trying to use the distro disk versions of it 
however, one of Paul Jerkatis's downfalls.  He had no understanding of the 
machine code under the level of the compiler at all. There was quite a bit 
of breakage there anytime the src files went past a nominally 10k in size 
barrier, primarily in the original c.prep, and IMO in the packages ability 
to code for bit shifts as it used the 1 bit at a time, shifted thru 16 
bits, when it should have done a modulo 8 on the number and a register tfr 
for the first 8, dozens of times faster.  That however is just a pet peeve 
of mine, but it impacts the objects execution time, a lot.  By using that 
in rzsz, it got nominally 220 cps faster!  Since without it, it was only 
good for a little over 450 cps, that to me was a measurable, worth my time 
to hand edit its .a files and fix it, improvement.  If you have an rzsz 
newer than 3.17, you are running it.

My $0.02.

> From: gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:23 AM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] The Mark Twain of operating systems...
> 
> On Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:19:51 AM Boisy G. Pitre did opine:
> > Very interesting post, Al.  I had no idea RadiSys had made such a faux
> > pas on their website.
> > 
> > It's amazing to me that after all Microware has been through, that
> > OS-9 is still being sold and used in designs, given the absolute
> > predominance of embedded Linux which is free.
> > 
> > I miss working with OS-9 and Microware.  It's just too bad Microware
> > couldn't keep things afloat and had to hack away it's talent through
> > attrition.  To me, that was one of the saddest things I ever had to
> > witness.
> > 
> > Who's requesting a port of GCC to OS-9?  I would think that the focus
> > should be making LLVM work with OS-9. --
> > Boisy G. Pitre
> > http://www.tee-boy.com/
> 
> Boisy, for those of us who aren't familiar with the LLVM acronym, can
> you give a half page list of what it does, and does better?
> 
> Cheers, Gene


Cheers, Gene
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