5 ms·

The Thirty Million Line Problem (2018) [video]

sova 7y ago
This is real talk! But, How does this appeal to a unified architecture interfere with the marketspace? I'd love for more programmers to listen to this video and give their thoughts!
- mac01021 7y ago
  I'm no authority on this stuff, but I don't think it has to be one single universal ISA for everything. In the same way I can compile my C program to run on x86 or arm, I can design it to interface with two different possible storage device architectures, if I want to.
ncmncm 7y ago
Remember when the SDI ("Strategic Defense Initiative"), "Star Wars", Reagan's fraudulent ballistic-missile defense project, was considered impossible to implement because (as reported by David Parnas) it would take a million lines of code to implement, and (more importantly) would have to work right, on the first try? The program was believed-in by the Soviet military, which spent so much on countermeasures it crashed the Soviet economy, bringing down Gorbachev and, ultimately, the USSR itself. Which seemed OK at the time (people talked about a "peace dividend" -- joke was on us!), but now we have Putin. And Trump. But I got a free trip to Hungary, in 1987, to report on research in point semiconductor defects, paid for by a grant from the US Air Force out of their Star Wars budget.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  Maybe this is a stupid question but how does the Star Wars initiative relate to the movies if at all?
  - MarkSweep 7y ago
    Senator Ted Kennedy is credited with creating the nickname "Star Wars" to mock the project: http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.army.mil/2008/Historical/Eagle/WheredowegetStarWars.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.a... The nickname does indeed refer to the movies, which were released a few years earlier.
  - blihp 7y ago
    SDI was the actual initiative, Star Wars was the derogatory nickname. Star Wars involved a science fiction plot taking place in space which critics believed described SDI perfectly. It was also timely since Return of the Jedi would be released a few months after the SDI announcement in 1983... so Star Wars was already on people's minds.
- otakucode 7y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. The reason SDI is suicide to build is because the countermeasures are ridiculously cheap and compensating for them is ridiculously expensive. It will always be an order of magnitude (or ten) cheaper to build more almost-free decoy warheads than it will be to expand the tracking, targetting, and interception capability of the system shooting down the 'warheads'. You just deployed a system that can handle 100 warheads at once? Next month I'll roll out 100 decoys and 50 legitimate warheads. It'll cost me $2 million and for you to handle an extra 50 will take you years and cost $2 billion. If you want your system to be effective, you have to agree to your own death by economic attrition.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Do you understand what "fraudulent" means?
    - DiabloD3 7y ago
      I believe the use of the word "fraudulent" was indeed correct here. It was a program initiated by the post-WW2 military industrial complex to use a national crisis (the Cold War) to profit and regularize excessive defense spending, as per standard neoliberal tactics of the time. The program spent a lot of money, made a lot of large visible moves, and in the end, did not produce one single thing, offensive or defensive. Tax dollars (not) at work.
zamalek 7y ago
It takes "17 million lines of code in Thing X to do Activity Y" is patently wrong. Many of the lines of code in Linux is dedicated to drivers, drivers which are likely not even loaded. Many more lines of code may be unused this specific scenario, if you are simply reading on WordPress, you aren't using the admin code at all. The reality is that a miniscule amount of those lines of code is involved in the activity. You can write an OS and stack that could achieve a very specific task (IncludeOS), but then it could only perform that one task. Now that there is 'no wasteful code', how would he record his weekly screencast, or edit it, or transcode it, or upload it, or view it? Everyone would only be able to view text files. These systems are this complex because there is demand for them to be. This really seems like tilting at windmills.
- smadge 7y ago
  I think that’s exactly the point. There are millions of untestable lines of driver code which may or may not be run depending on your users hardware configurations. There could be bugs or vulnerabilities sitting in those lines and there is no way to test all the cases. I didn’t watch the whole thing but I think the talk proposes a standard ISA which eliminates the need for drivers, so your code literally runs on bare metal.
  - zamalek 7y ago
    Smells like a leaky abstraction - it's just kicking the can down the road. What if you have novel hardware that is unsupported by this ISA? Say, an ML accelerator or a quantum coprocessor.
    - kortex 7y ago
      Exactly this. The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch. He relies on (based on his episode guide titles) Windows, C++, DirectSound, OpenGL, just to name a few, not to mention human interface devices, to achieve this in a remotely reasonable timeframe. Yes, he's got a point about over-relying on layers of abstraction, but that abstraction was written with untold millions of dev-hours across thousands of organizational structures and independent individuals. The only way to get pieces of such disparate pedigree to operate together is abstraction and APIs. You have to bottleneck and standardize complexity to logical boundaries or else everyone ends up rewriting their OS to ship with their game. A standardized ISA wouldn't fix this because you still need standardized OS ABIs, hardware wire protocols, network protocols, media write protocols. His argument boils down to "get all engineers to agree upon an ISA, OS, SoC, hardware interface". As a start, he suggests "Simplify the NIC, SATA, USB and video interface". Yeah, ok, I'll believe that can happen when engineers agree upon bike shed colors reliably. When you're basically the only person in the stack, it's easy to naively say "just standardize everything!" but as anyone who has been to any organizational meetings knows, getting humans to agree on ANYTHING is an involved process.
otakucode 7y ago
So it's not just me. I've considered developing a toy OS as a fun project for a long time, but I was always mystified about what to do about graphics. The whole reason I wanted to do an OS was to do a sort of 'start fresh' thing where I looked at the hardware we have now and designed for THAT instead of designing to support 1970s era software. The first step is if it's a 4K monitor, the first graphics mode is 4K, not 80x25 text. Fonts are vector by default, not raster. Graphical compositing of the display, even when its the initial 'text mode' terminal would be rendered on a 3D isometric projection surface using a hardware accelerated graphics card. And how do you do that exactly? Even if you are willing to limit yourself to a single nVidia or ATi card supported to start? Ah...
- phaedrus 7y ago
  A similar situation applies to 3D graphics for game engine programming. You'd think if a piece of hardware can run a AAA game with impressive graphical effects at 60 FPS, it should be able to run your simple indie game engine with simple graphics for proportionally less development effort. But, no, it turns out unlike CPU's where we got so many "speed ups for free", most of the things that make the AAA game able run so fast with so many effects are bespoke, opt-in features. (The following is based on my experience learning from the Irrlicht engine. YMMV) You find a random N-year-old basic OpenGL tutorial and it doesn't run N/1.5 iterations of Moore's law faster now, it still runs inexplicably slowly (compared to what you know that hardware theoretically should be able to do with modern games). You have to figure out, oh it's not using GPU memory for the meshes, how do I tell the driver to do that? Fixed that, but wait I'm using immediate mode, retained mode would be faster. Wait is retained mode going away, what's replacing it? So I gotta learn shaders now too? The problem is the APIs are terrible and the drivers are buggy. The levels of abstraction keep being chosen all wrong - too low-level for the library or drivers to give user code "speed ups for free" and too high-level for a power user of the API to be able to be able to tell directly what's happening and profile what's making things slow. A better model would be to break the high-level and low-level into two layers, like the Clang / LLVM compiler. The high level API defined by an organization like an OpenGL working group and they could provide a reference implementation front-end (corresponding to Clang or another compiler front-end in this analogy). The hardware vendors would just provide the low-level implementation (corresponding to LLVM).
columboslastq 7y ago
I would be very curious to know the thoughts of HN readers: Is it a good idea (define a system wide spec to remove the need for drivers etc.)? Seems to make sense to me, but i know nothing. If someone defined one, an emulator could be written. may even be able to prove some gain that would make it attractive for a manufacturer to impliment it.
- sp332 7y ago
  I like the idea, yeah. Virtual machines running in Xen hypervisors can be very small because they can make a lot of assumptions about the "hardware" they are running on. And as a negative example, every Android ROM has to be compiled and distributed separately for each model of phone it supports, because ARM platforms don't have a BIOS layer so they can't generalize.

sova 7y ago

This is real talk! But, How does this appeal to a unified architecture interfere with the marketspace? I'd love for more programmers to listen to this video and give their thoughts!

mac01021 7y ago
I'm no authority on this stuff, but I don't think it has to be one single universal ISA for everything. In the same way I can compile my C program to run on x86 or arm, I can design it to interface with two different possible storage device architectures, if I want to.

ncmncm 7y ago

Remember when the SDI ("Strategic Defense Initiative"), "Star Wars", Reagan's fraudulent ballistic-missile defense project, was considered impossible to implement because (as reported by David Parnas) it would take a million lines of code to implement, and (more importantly) would have to work right, on the first try? The program was believed-in by the Soviet military, which spent so much on countermeasures it crashed the Soviet economy, bringing down Gorbachev and, ultimately, the USSR itself. Which seemed OK at the time (people talked about a "peace dividend" -- joke was on us!), but now we have Putin. And Trump. But I got a free trip to Hungary, in 1987, to report on research in point semiconductor defects, paid for by a grant from the US Air Force out of their Star Wars budget.

im3w1l 7y ago
Maybe this is a stupid question but how does the Star Wars initiative relate to the movies if at all?
- MarkSweep 7y ago
  Senator Ted Kennedy is credited with creating the nickname "Star Wars" to mock the project: http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.army.mil/2008/Historical/Eagle/WheredowegetStarWars.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.a... The nickname does indeed refer to the movies, which were released a few years earlier.
- blihp 7y ago
  SDI was the actual initiative, Star Wars was the derogatory nickname. Star Wars involved a science fiction plot taking place in space which critics believed described SDI perfectly. It was also timely since Return of the Jedi would be released a few months after the SDI announcement in 1983... so Star Wars was already on people's minds.
otakucode 7y ago
That doesn't make any sense. The reason SDI is suicide to build is because the countermeasures are ridiculously cheap and compensating for them is ridiculously expensive. It will always be an order of magnitude (or ten) cheaper to build more almost-free decoy warheads than it will be to expand the tracking, targetting, and interception capability of the system shooting down the 'warheads'. You just deployed a system that can handle 100 warheads at once? Next month I'll roll out 100 decoys and 50 legitimate warheads. It'll cost me $2 million and for you to handle an extra 50 will take you years and cost $2 billion. If you want your system to be effective, you have to agree to your own death by economic attrition.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Do you understand what "fraudulent" means?
  - DiabloD3 7y ago
    I believe the use of the word "fraudulent" was indeed correct here. It was a program initiated by the post-WW2 military industrial complex to use a national crisis (the Cold War) to profit and regularize excessive defense spending, as per standard neoliberal tactics of the time. The program spent a lot of money, made a lot of large visible moves, and in the end, did not produce one single thing, offensive or defensive. Tax dollars (not) at work.

zamalek 7y ago

It takes "17 million lines of code in Thing X to do Activity Y" is patently wrong. Many of the lines of code in Linux is dedicated to drivers, drivers which are likely not even loaded. Many more lines of code may be unused this specific scenario, if you are simply reading on WordPress, you aren't using the admin code at all. The reality is that a miniscule amount of those lines of code is involved in the activity. You can write an OS and stack that could achieve a very specific task (IncludeOS), but then it could only perform that one task. Now that there is 'no wasteful code', how would he record his weekly screencast, or edit it, or transcode it, or upload it, or view it? Everyone would only be able to view text files. These systems are this complex because there is demand for them to be. This really seems like tilting at windmills.

smadge 7y ago
I think that’s exactly the point. There are millions of untestable lines of driver code which may or may not be run depending on your users hardware configurations. There could be bugs or vulnerabilities sitting in those lines and there is no way to test all the cases. I didn’t watch the whole thing but I think the talk proposes a standard ISA which eliminates the need for drivers, so your code literally runs on bare metal.
- zamalek 7y ago
  Smells like a leaky abstraction - it's just kicking the can down the road. What if you have novel hardware that is unsupported by this ISA? Say, an ML accelerator or a quantum coprocessor.
  - kortex 7y ago
    Exactly this. The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch. He relies on (based on his episode guide titles) Windows, C++, DirectSound, OpenGL, just to name a few, not to mention human interface devices, to achieve this in a remotely reasonable timeframe. Yes, he's got a point about over-relying on layers of abstraction, but that abstraction was written with untold millions of dev-hours across thousands of organizational structures and independent individuals. The only way to get pieces of such disparate pedigree to operate together is abstraction and APIs. You have to bottleneck and standardize complexity to logical boundaries or else everyone ends up rewriting their OS to ship with their game. A standardized ISA wouldn't fix this because you still need standardized OS ABIs, hardware wire protocols, network protocols, media write protocols. His argument boils down to "get all engineers to agree upon an ISA, OS, SoC, hardware interface". As a start, he suggests "Simplify the NIC, SATA, USB and video interface". Yeah, ok, I'll believe that can happen when engineers agree upon bike shed colors reliably. When you're basically the only person in the stack, it's easy to naively say "just standardize everything!" but as anyone who has been to any organizational meetings knows, getting humans to agree on ANYTHING is an involved process.

otakucode 7y ago

So it's not just me. I've considered developing a toy OS as a fun project for a long time, but I was always mystified about what to do about graphics. The whole reason I wanted to do an OS was to do a sort of 'start fresh' thing where I looked at the hardware we have now and designed for THAT instead of designing to support 1970s era software. The first step is if it's a 4K monitor, the first graphics mode is 4K, not 80x25 text. Fonts are vector by default, not raster. Graphical compositing of the display, even when its the initial 'text mode' terminal would be rendered on a 3D isometric projection surface using a hardware accelerated graphics card. And how do you do that exactly? Even if you are willing to limit yourself to a single nVidia or ATi card supported to start? Ah...

phaedrus 7y ago
A similar situation applies to 3D graphics for game engine programming. You'd think if a piece of hardware can run a AAA game with impressive graphical effects at 60 FPS, it should be able to run your simple indie game engine with simple graphics for proportionally less development effort. But, no, it turns out unlike CPU's where we got so many "speed ups for free", most of the things that make the AAA game able run so fast with so many effects are bespoke, opt-in features. (The following is based on my experience learning from the Irrlicht engine. YMMV) You find a random N-year-old basic OpenGL tutorial and it doesn't run N/1.5 iterations of Moore's law faster now, it still runs inexplicably slowly (compared to what you know that hardware theoretically should be able to do with modern games). You have to figure out, oh it's not using GPU memory for the meshes, how do I tell the driver to do that? Fixed that, but wait I'm using immediate mode, retained mode would be faster. Wait is retained mode going away, what's replacing it? So I gotta learn shaders now too? The problem is the APIs are terrible and the drivers are buggy. The levels of abstraction keep being chosen all wrong - too low-level for the library or drivers to give user code "speed ups for free" and too high-level for a power user of the API to be able to be able to tell directly what's happening and profile what's making things slow. A better model would be to break the high-level and low-level into two layers, like the Clang / LLVM compiler. The high level API defined by an organization like an OpenGL working group and they could provide a reference implementation front-end (corresponding to Clang or another compiler front-end in this analogy). The hardware vendors would just provide the low-level implementation (corresponding to LLVM).

columboslastq 7y ago

I would be very curious to know the thoughts of HN readers: Is it a good idea (define a system wide spec to remove the need for drivers etc.)? Seems to make sense to me, but i know nothing. If someone defined one, an emulator could be written. may even be able to prove some gain that would make it attractive for a manufacturer to impliment it.

sp332 7y ago
I like the idea, yeah. Virtual machines running in Xen hypervisors can be very small because they can make a lot of assumptions about the "hardware" they are running on. And as a negative example, every Android ROM has to be compiled and distributed separately for each model of phone it supports, because ARM platforms don't have a BIOS layer so they can't generalize.