3 ms·
That summarizes the familiar high-level world of recent times. (But then I'm also old enough to remember when compiler gremlins were ubiquitous.) The lower-le
by Hoff 15y ago
That summarizes the familiar high-level world of recent times. (But then I'm also old enough to remember when compiler gremlins were ubiquitous.)
The lower-level world can be quite a bit more unseemly, what with the unpredictability of occasionally marginal voltages or power supplies, of RAS recovery and the occasional RAS and ECC errors, of sections of system buses lacking ED/EDC protection, the "fun" that is radioactive RAM and embedded alpha emitters (particularly "entertaining" if you don't have solid EDC), bus transients, and a host of other hardware gremlins.
Looking at the lowest levels of these boxes, I something marvel that these modern computing boxes even work at all, much less as well as they do.
- jcromartie 15y agoAnd that's why I say that it works for the vast majority of instructions that are executed. There is that slim chance that it will flub up, but that kind of error either: A) gets caught in the hardware or B) completely takes down the operating system or app. The likelihood of some cosmic ray flipping a bit of a counter variable in some loop's sub-millisecond lifespan is just so unimaginably small you can count it impossible.