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It is sad that the current status quo on software development consider vendor lookup as a good thing. For example, people feel that it is good to use only one p
by coliveira 15y ago
It is sad that the current status quo on software development consider vendor lookup as a good thing. For example, people feel that it is good to use only one processor architecture (x86), and even think that a corporation-sponsored virtual machine (JVM) is a "good thing". No wonder why systems research is basically dead, only trying to improve over the clumsiness of existing architectures.
- chrisjsmith 15y agoAgreed entirely. It's one of the things that has been annoying me for years. The x86 ISA is an utter mess - totally non-orthogonal. Why we keep worshipping it I don't know. The last innovation was Forth on a Chip if you ask me.
- coliveira 15y agoI was reading another day about the PDP 11, and it is incredible how it looked much easier to program than an x86. Maybe we should go back in time and try to learn some of the forgotten tricks.
- chrisjsmith 15y agoARM is like that now (which was ironically invented by Acorn in the UK for the UK education market).
- coliveira 15y agoIn fact this explains a lot. Thanks for pointing it.
- FreeDonne 15y agoPDP-11 architecture is nice to implement in microcode, it's probably a little bit difficult to make it a RISC given that its power and simplicity comes from the elegant addressing modes encoding. The VAX was nice too, and the Tahoe/cci (kind of 3 address extension of the VAX IIRC).
- zokier 15y agoPeople are worshiping x86 ISA?