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Well, it was a totally bespoke CPU, and we don't have any working models on earth. Writing an assembler for a bespoke CPU is one thing, many of us have done it
by mystified5016 2y ago
Well, it was a totally bespoke CPU, and we don't have any working models on earth.
Writing an assembler for a bespoke CPU is one thing, many of us have done it as a toy project, but stakes are a bit different here. You'd have to mathematically prove your assembler and disassembler are absolutely 100% correct. When your only working model is utterly irreplaceable and irrecoverable upon error, it probably takes a lot more resources to develop.
- jstanley 2y agoAnd if you can't mathematically prove it correct, you're better off doing it in your head?
- chuckadams 2y agoNo but the time it would take to build the assembler and validate its output would take more time than just writing the patch by hand. It’s for a craft that isn’t going to last more than 5 more years tops anyway.
- mannyv 2y agoWhat you're saying is that "creating a tool requires validation, but not creating a tool and winging it doesn't." Which is engineering-speak ridiculous. To debug anything you need a mental model of the thing in question. With that mental model you can build a software-based model of it (a simulation), you can document it, or both. But for some reason you believe that documentation doesn't require validation, but the tool that expresses a model represented by the documentation does not. Realistically speaking, they have 2 days between command and response, so they have plenty of time to write a simulator.