4 ms·
TP is about the same size as Leor Zolman's C compiler for the 8080. Fast-forward about seven years, and my company was looking at an interpreted BASIC implemen
by kabdib 15y ago
TP is about the same size as Leor Zolman's C compiler for the 8080.
Fast-forward about seven years, and my company was looking at an interpreted BASIC implementation that took about 120K. Since this was supposed to live in ROM, you could think about it as Real Money. We dug into it and found all kinds of fat -- the usual 13 fear-based reimplementations of strlen and strcpy, about a zillion porting layers, endless amounts of cut-and-paste nonsense.
Somewhere between 1978 and 1985, the software industry's drive to be lean and mean on PCs died. I found myself writing 'sed' scripts to do peephole optimization on the intermediate assembly language of one of the C compilers we were using. It was pathetic.
Now, of course, I light my cigars with gigabytes. But in terms of actual cost, I'm still a cheap bastard and I probably don't spend any more money per year on CPUs, memory or storage than I did 30 years ago.
Had a chance last year to write a mission-critical hunk of code that /had/ to fit into 1920 bytes. I can't tell you how much fun that was.
- archgoon 15y ago>Had a chance last year to write a mission-critical hunk of code that /had/ to fit into 1920 bytes. Awesome. What was that for? Please don't leave us hanging :)
- xarien 15y agoI'm guessing DoD if he used the word mission.
- perokreco 15y agoMission-critical is actually a pretty common term and not really connected to the military.
- xarien 15y agoI don't disagree that it's used outside of defense. It's just used very very commonly in defense. Just harmless speculation ;).
- skrebbel 15y agoBig bucketloads of business terms and concepts were stolen from the military. Tactical advantages, strategic initiatives, anyone? And what about the ranking system in your average BigCo? They guys aren't called Sergeant or General but in effect it's the same.
- wlievens 15y agoWould be something in an embedded context.
- 1000110101 15y agomission-critical = consulting company, govt contractor, some organization with advanced bureaucracy another question: why is sed in quotes? tis true what you say. somewhere in that time, better hardware and better storage became an excuse to write worse software. and this has continued unchecked to the present. programmers rejoice in the option to be lazy, sloppy and ignorant as if this signifies great advances in software. small advances perhaps relative to the huge advances in hardware and storage. but the real loss is one of skill.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Figs 15y ago"the usual 13 fear-based reimplementations of strlen and strcpy" What does that mean?
- dbattaglia 15y agoI assumed he meant that a bunch of different programmers on the project thought they could avoid buffer overruns by either wrapping or completely re-implementing strlen/strcpy themselves. And probably not ending up any more safe than the standard versions.