4 ms·

It depends. For instance, Borland's Turbo Pascal with its one-pass compiler was pretty damn fast. Its edit/compile/run cycle was amazing (an "ECRL" as fast as a

It depends. For instance, Borland's Turbo Pascal with its one-pass compiler was pretty damn fast. Its edit/compile/run cycle was amazing (an "ECRL" as fast as a REPL). And this with 64KB RAM. Whereas some of today's IDEs and language-layered-on-a-VM experiences aren't nearly so fast. Granted they're working much harder. But the end-user experience is not always faster these days.

elteto 13y ago
Ahh! The good ol' days. I started programming with Turbo Pascal when I was around 7 years old, I still remember the green glow of the CRT and the clickety-clack of oh-so-heavy mechanical keyboards. Man, those were good times, interrupting the BIOS, corrupting sectors and playing paratroopers deep into the night :D
coldtea 13y ago
>It depends. For instance, Borland's Turbo Pascal with its one-pass compiler was pretty damn fast. Its edit/compile/run cycle was amazing (an "ECRL" as fast as a REPL). And this with 64KB RAM. Still, not comparable. That means that TP had to work on the memory, and not touch disk (else it wouldn't be speedy at all). Which probably means that the libraries available would be miniscule. A decent graphics (or even math) lib can be well over 1MB. Did you got much out of that era TP besides the ability to use the core language structures?
- 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
  Yep, particularly since touching the disk meant a 5-1/4" floppy diskette. But no, the programs weren't toys. They were an order of magnitude more complex than most of today's smart phone apps. And in fact, PCs were the smart phones of their day -- a fun size version of what had been considered "real" computing, initially not taken seriously, but destined to evolve quickly. Also you had direct access to the hardware -- there weren't ten layers of virtualization, protection, and APIs in between. You could do near-realtime things, very low latency. I think that's part of what contributed to the subjective experience being quite fast... provided you didn't need to hit the floppy disk!
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > Which probably means that the libraries available would be miniscule. A decent graphics (or even math) lib can be well over 1MB. Did you got much out of that era TP besides the ability to use the core language structures? A decent graphics/math lib written in TP could be much smaller than 1MB. There's tons of 64k demos written with Turbo Pascal (it helps that it has inline asm). By which I mean "decent" for that era. Say, a functional SVG engine would be something different of course. The math lib would probably also have to spend bytes on certain functionality that we'd today consider "core language".

elteto 13y ago

Ahh! The good ol' days. I started programming with Turbo Pascal when I was around 7 years old, I still remember the green glow of the CRT and the clickety-clack of oh-so-heavy mechanical keyboards. Man, those were good times, interrupting the BIOS, corrupting sectors and playing paratroopers deep into the night :D

coldtea 13y ago

>It depends. For instance, Borland's Turbo Pascal with its one-pass compiler was pretty damn fast. Its edit/compile/run cycle was amazing (an "ECRL" as fast as a REPL). And this with 64KB RAM. Still, not comparable. That means that TP had to work on the memory, and not touch disk (else it wouldn't be speedy at all). Which probably means that the libraries available would be miniscule. A decent graphics (or even math) lib can be well over 1MB. Did you got much out of that era TP besides the ability to use the core language structures?

6cxs2hd6 13y ago
Yep, particularly since touching the disk meant a 5-1/4" floppy diskette. But no, the programs weren't toys. They were an order of magnitude more complex than most of today's smart phone apps. And in fact, PCs were the smart phones of their day -- a fun size version of what had been considered "real" computing, initially not taken seriously, but destined to evolve quickly. Also you had direct access to the hardware -- there weren't ten layers of virtualization, protection, and APIs in between. You could do near-realtime things, very low latency. I think that's part of what contributed to the subjective experience being quite fast... provided you didn't need to hit the floppy disk!
tripzilch 13y ago
> Which probably means that the libraries available would be miniscule. A decent graphics (or even math) lib can be well over 1MB. Did you got much out of that era TP besides the ability to use the core language structures? A decent graphics/math lib written in TP could be much smaller than 1MB. There's tons of 64k demos written with Turbo Pascal (it helps that it has inline asm). By which I mean "decent" for that era. Say, a functional SVG engine would be something different of course. The math lib would probably also have to spend bytes on certain functionality that we'd today consider "core language".