5 ms·
> CISC was always better externally ...aside from being orders of magnitude more of an ass-pain if you ever have to write software that actually deals with mac
by 1amzave 12y ago
> CISC was always better externally
...aside from being orders of magnitude more of an ass-pain if you ever have to write software that actually deals with machine code (at least on x86; perhaps other CISCs aren't as bad).
Simple example: given an instruction boundary, find the preceding instruction boundary. On most any RISC it's trivial (subtract 4, or perhaps 2 in some cases). On x86...I'm not an expert, but I'm about 80% confident it's basically impossible to do in the general case.
- voidlogic 12y ago>...aside from being orders of magnitude more of an ass-pain if you ever have to write software that actually deals with machine code 1. I was talking about external as in the memory hierarchy not development effort. >(at least on x86; perhaps other CISCs aren't as bad). This, the PDP-11 machines have a lovely instruction set for example.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 12y agoThis is certainly impossible on x86 - you can even interleave two different instruction streams (which is mainly used to confuse static analysis tools).