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> nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult pl
by zamalek 8y ago
> nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine
Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult platform to get hold of and tinker with.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoI’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for the last twenty years.
- Something1234 8y agoHP has a compiler group. I wasn't aware there were all that many commercial compilers still around, and I definitely wouldn't have thought of HP.
- ghaff 8y agoWho else do you think would have developed the compilers for HP-UX, VMS, and NonStop?
- Something1234 8y agoPresent tense. The GP comment was in present tense, not a long time ago.
- jandrese 8y agoThere were people trying, but there are some real fundamental issues with the approach for general purpose computing. It's extremely hard for a compiler to know if some data is in cache, in memory, or way out in swap. Without this information it's very hard to know how long any memory fetch is going to take. If you're trying to run a lot of computation in parallel that has some interdependencies then this information is paramount. It's kind of like trying to use a GPU for general purpose computation. Itanium should have been a coprocessor.