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Ted's C programming posts make me feel really old, because I can remember exactly the same programming topics being discussed in the mid 90s. And that's C devel

Ted's C programming posts make me feel really old, because I can remember exactly the same programming topics being discussed in the mid 90s. And that's C development for you, really.. every old bug is new again. It's frankly boring that 20 years later we still feel attracted to discuss any of this stuff. It's not like the machines or the code running on them have fundamentally changed in the interim..

Flow 12y ago
Not fundamentally changed, but some things have become more expensive so old assumptions and optimisations should be re-evalued, it's just sound engineering really.
- userbinator 12y ago
  One of the best examples of this being the increasing gap between memory and CPU speeds. Good cache usage is far more important than before.
  - Flow 12y ago
    Yes, I had that example in mind. Another example, I might be wrong here though, is the ooold disk handling code in BSD, where you had to specify cylinders, heads and other things, and the OS tried to optimize performance based on closeness. See here for more info: http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/~csc369h/fall/lectures/w10/DiskIO.pdf http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/~csc369h/fall/lectures/w10/DiskIO... Today, I imagine most I/O interfaces use a large block index instead of cyl/disk/head and other ancient specifications. All the optimizations about head and so on is device dependent and is best handled by the disk itself. Imagine the feeling of being able to delete old code in the disk subsystem and get a cleaner and more abstract view of the disk.