4 ms·

Still a terrible thing to do. I think it's possible just calling printf() itself could do wacky things if printf is depending on the stack being set up a certa

Still a terrible thing to do. I think it's possible just calling printf() itself could do wacky things if printf is depending on the stack being set up a certain way by the C runtime startup code prior to main. But the real issue is that what he's doing is completely unnecessary, because you could manage multiple stacks yourself using ordinary C data structures and ordinary C code. Evidently he thinks he's gaining some kind of speed advantage by doing things this way, but the risk is very high versus the gain. This kind of optimization may have worked OK on a DOS machine, but it's neither safe nor obviously faster to do things like this on a modern CPU and OS.

Confusion 16y ago
Well, doing terrible things is sometimes necessary to perform magic or to get a better understanding about how things work. From the less flamey parts of the discussion, I gather his ideas weren't all that unsound, just extremely hard to pull off.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Generally speaking if you have to do terrible things then you need to a: know exactly what you are doing before hand and b: have the fortitude to be able to withstand harsh criticism until you can prove your code. In this case I think the harsh criticism was fully justified. People should be warned away from doing this sort of thing, precisely because it's hard to get right. As the thread makes abundantly clear the original programmer was fairly clueless, otherwise he wouldn't have gone off half-cocked thinking that the fault was with cygwin or somesuch. He was making his own dynamite and was too clueless to realize what he was doing wrong.
  - Confusion 16y ago
    I don't agree: we have no reason to doubt his claim that he wrote a task switcher for DOS. That means he's reasonably clueful. It's easy to dismiss someone as a complete loony, because he's wrong/confused about some things and is getting burned to the ground for that. Remove the flaming and there is criticism and the pointing out of mistakes, but nothing to indicate the guy has no clue whatsoever. If that were the case, it would be hard to even being criticising the idea. The fact that people could succinctly point out the problems means the ideas were stated in reasonably clear language.

Confusion 16y ago

Well, doing terrible things is sometimes necessary to perform magic or to get a better understanding about how things work. From the less flamey parts of the discussion, I gather his ideas weren't all that unsound, just extremely hard to pull off.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
Generally speaking if you have to do terrible things then you need to a: know exactly what you are doing before hand and b: have the fortitude to be able to withstand harsh criticism until you can prove your code. In this case I think the harsh criticism was fully justified. People should be warned away from doing this sort of thing, precisely because it's hard to get right. As the thread makes abundantly clear the original programmer was fairly clueless, otherwise he wouldn't have gone off half-cocked thinking that the fault was with cygwin or somesuch. He was making his own dynamite and was too clueless to realize what he was doing wrong.
- Confusion 16y ago
  I don't agree: we have no reason to doubt his claim that he wrote a task switcher for DOS. That means he's reasonably clueful. It's easy to dismiss someone as a complete loony, because he's wrong/confused about some things and is getting burned to the ground for that. Remove the flaming and there is criticism and the pointing out of mistakes, but nothing to indicate the guy has no clue whatsoever. If that were the case, it would be hard to even being criticising the idea. The fact that people could succinctly point out the problems means the ideas were stated in reasonably clear language.