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I still see tight hardware constraints now. Until '10 I was working at a company that made flash CF cards which used 8-bit processors. 32K of SRAM and 64K of co
by pkaye 12y ago
I still see tight hardware constraints now. Until '10 I was working at a company that made flash CF cards which used 8-bit processors. 32K of SRAM and 64K of code space with bank switching. Every clock cycled mattered. Hand coded division operations. 32-bit integers are a luxury. Even wrote some self modifying code for an inner loop that boosted performance by 25%. Nowadays that company is using ARM processors but you still hit constraints (usually memory) not seen on PCs and servers.
- mkramlich 12y agoas I've gotten older I've increasingly wondered if I should make the jump (back, technically) to low-level programming. working on those highly constrained devices, every cycle matters, every bit, every watt, etc. because that's where I started as a kid and think it would give me a market advantage over the younger generation who've grown up with supercomputers in their pockets, a dozen high-level languages to choose from, frameworks for everything, tutorials and videos for everything, and not really having to worry about performance or resource usage like "we" used to have to do just to make anything work at all.
- pkaye 12y agoYeah low-level programming was why I have been working on firmware for a long time. But working on truly resource constrained systems can get old. Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. I'm glad that we are now working on 32-bit processors.
- lgieron 12y ago> Instead of really solving the problem at hand, you have to work on quirks and idiosyncrasies. FWIW, I work in Big Data and feel the same way :)