4 ms·

I have to say, I'm really happy that this seems a sort of resurgence of a proper CPU architecture diversity. I'm getting bored of the x86/ARM dichotomy.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry (easier to learn and study just one ISA instead of many) and lowering the amount of maintenance and development work that has to be done on development infrastructure such as compilers. This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a separate issue. A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer.
- panpanna 7y ago
  OpenBSD folks think supporting more architectures have helped them creating a better OS.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    Yup...Theo specifically talks about alignment restrictions on SPARC as catching all sorts of weird corner-case bugs.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  My usual take is that it gives us better efficiency in the short-term, at the expense of making it far more likely that we get stuck in a rut long-term.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Kinda like Japan's economy. Lots of old companies trying to keep up and very little outside entrepreneurship to disrupt and progress the industries.
- gnode 7y ago
  I agree that there's a programmer cost to having a multiplicity of ISAs. However, ISAs still have some relation to the design of the microarchitecture, which for x86 processors is not open. The RISC-V ISA for instance was created mainly because it helped the effort to create open CPU hardware.
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be made in programming. Like when the whole world got rid of all those esoteric 18-bit-word and worse architectures, and started writing loads of C for 32-bit i386. Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc. It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features. We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.
  - frozenport 7y ago
    Actually before x86 dominance, pre 90s many developers would write in ASM or convert C/pascal to ASM. This kind of code wasn't very portable.
  - gumby 7y ago
    The 18- ad 36-bit architectures weren't esoteric at the time! Though may of them also had bad (outdated, and not-obviously bad at the time) ideas like one's complement arithmetic. Machines like the PDP-10 were a pleasure to program in assembly, but I haven't written a line of assembly code in over a decade. But I agree the world is full of "slap it together and if it runs once, ship it" software -- that's what gave us Y2K. Time to re-read worse is better.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      In retrospect, it's amazing how older games like Age of Empires work so well and (almost) bug free from the get go. In the software development environment for late 90s the amount of work to making sure that it works (without crashing!) is amazing. With extreme logging now our team still throws a bunch of internal errors today, granted our team is much smaller but still, those older games are amazing.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      "If you're not working with 36 bits, you're not working with a full DEC!" -DIGEX (Doug Humphrey) trolling the 32-bit VAX weenies at DECUS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- madez 7y ago
  I think it is appropriate to specify your statement with a significant detail; a ISA monoculture enables quicker and more efficient development of proprietary software. Free and open software deals efficiently and fast with different ISA's, as can be seen in the ports of Debian and the targets of GCC.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Free software is great, but it's not efficiently developed. That's why it's been so hard for people to get a satisfactory Linux on the desktop GUI and it's still a crapshoot to even get all of a laptop working .
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  > Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry > A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer. Then let's standardize on a single open and royalty-free one. That excludes x86 and ARM.
ken 7y ago
I'll celebrate implementation diversity, but I'm not sure why I'd celebrate interface diversity. All it does is create pointless incompatibilities that users have to deal with. I think it's great that many companies have their own implementation of open standards like Unicode, TCP/IP, and SMTP. Life was worse in every way when every company had their own special encodings for text files, and their own proprietary network protocols. I can type some text in Japanese and email it to a friend, in 2019, and it will just work. Excellent! The continued survival of x86 and other proprietary instruction sets reeks to me of the days of the "Best Viewed with ${browser}" badges. It's purely a pain point for users, for what appears to be merely a battle of egos among the world's richest megacorporations. Praising the growth of a third CPU opcode system sounds to me like wanting to bring back, say, the Scottish historical units of measurement, on the basis that we're "getting bored" with the SI/USCS duopoly. Bored is good! Bored means it works. I wish the USCS would die off, too, so I could be even more bored in that department.
kjs3 7y ago
SPARC has been open for a long time and there are numerous implementations. MIPS (and Longsoon) has been shipping forever. RISC-V is real. There's a project to create a re-implementation of SuperH. It's not like x86 & ARM is the only thing in the world...it's just the only thing that matters economically right now.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago

Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry (easier to learn and study just one ISA instead of many) and lowering the amount of maintenance and development work that has to be done on development infrastructure such as compilers. This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a separate issue. A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer.

panpanna 7y ago
OpenBSD folks think supporting more architectures have helped them creating a better OS.
- kjs3 7y ago
  Yup...Theo specifically talks about alignment restrictions on SPARC as catching all sorts of weird corner-case bugs.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
My usual take is that it gives us better efficiency in the short-term, at the expense of making it far more likely that we get stuck in a rut long-term.
- dmix 7y ago
  Kinda like Japan's economy. Lots of old companies trying to keep up and very little outside entrepreneurship to disrupt and progress the industries.
gnode 7y ago
I agree that there's a programmer cost to having a multiplicity of ISAs. However, ISAs still have some relation to the design of the microarchitecture, which for x86 processors is not open. The RISC-V ISA for instance was created mainly because it helped the effort to create open CPU hardware.
mnw21cam 7y ago
In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be made in programming. Like when the whole world got rid of all those esoteric 18-bit-word and worse architectures, and started writing loads of C for 32-bit i386. Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc. It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features. We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.
- frozenport 7y ago
  Actually before x86 dominance, pre 90s many developers would write in ASM or convert C/pascal to ASM. This kind of code wasn't very portable.
- gumby 7y ago
  The 18- ad 36-bit architectures weren't esoteric at the time! Though may of them also had bad (outdated, and not-obviously bad at the time) ideas like one's complement arithmetic. Machines like the PDP-10 were a pleasure to program in assembly, but I haven't written a line of assembly code in over a decade. But I agree the world is full of "slap it together and if it runs once, ship it" software -- that's what gave us Y2K. Time to re-read worse is better.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    In retrospect, it's amazing how older games like Age of Empires work so well and (almost) bug free from the get go. In the software development environment for late 90s the amount of work to making sure that it works (without crashing!) is amazing. With extreme logging now our team still throws a bunch of internal errors today, granted our team is much smaller but still, those older games are amazing.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    "If you're not working with 36 bits, you're not working with a full DEC!" -DIGEX (Doug Humphrey) trolling the 32-bit VAX weenies at DECUS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
madez 7y ago
I think it is appropriate to specify your statement with a significant detail; a ISA monoculture enables quicker and more efficient development of proprietary software. Free and open software deals efficiently and fast with different ISA's, as can be seen in the ports of Debian and the targets of GCC.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Free software is great, but it's not efficiently developed. That's why it's been so hard for people to get a satisfactory Linux on the desktop GUI and it's still a crapshoot to even get all of a laptop working .
pgeorgi 7y ago
> Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry > A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer. Then let's standardize on a single open and royalty-free one. That excludes x86 and ARM.

ken 7y ago

I'll celebrate implementation diversity, but I'm not sure why I'd celebrate interface diversity. All it does is create pointless incompatibilities that users have to deal with. I think it's great that many companies have their own implementation of open standards like Unicode, TCP/IP, and SMTP. Life was worse in every way when every company had their own special encodings for text files, and their own proprietary network protocols. I can type some text in Japanese and email it to a friend, in 2019, and it will just work. Excellent! The continued survival of x86 and other proprietary instruction sets reeks to me of the days of the "Best Viewed with ${browser}" badges. It's purely a pain point for users, for what appears to be merely a battle of egos among the world's richest megacorporations. Praising the growth of a third CPU opcode system sounds to me like wanting to bring back, say, the Scottish historical units of measurement, on the basis that we're "getting bored" with the SI/USCS duopoly. Bored is good! Bored means it works. I wish the USCS would die off, too, so I could be even more bored in that department.

kjs3 7y ago

SPARC has been open for a long time and there are numerous implementations. MIPS (and Longsoon) has been shipping forever. RISC-V is real. There's a project to create a re-implementation of SuperH. It's not like x86 & ARM is the only thing in the world...it's just the only thing that matters economically right now.