Date: Tue, 09 May 2000 18:14:48 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: J McKitrick <jcm@freebsd-uk.eu.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: assembly vs C Message-ID: <4.3.1.2.20000509175129.043fcb60@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20000509212637.A73322@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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At 02:26 PM 5/9/2000, J McKitrick wrote: >I've heard some debates recently, mostly by 'old-school' hackers from the >C64 days who are calling for a return to machine language. They claim that >CPU speed, memory size, and HD space will begin to plateau soon, and that ML >would bring a much needed return to efficiency and clean coding. They're right. Whenever you see perfectly adequate computers going for $400 or less (this has only happened a couple of times since the advent of the microcomputer), it means that there's a discontinuity somewhere. And these days the discontinuity has to do with bandwidth. Current applications, such as Internet browsers, do not even use up all of the power of the current hardware because the bottlenecks lie elsewhere -- to wit, in the network. Assembly language can help to bridge this gap by making the best possible use of the limited bandwidth we have available. In this case, the assembly language will be embedded in networking devices and/or in network software that does more with less. In embedded apps, assembler is ALWAYS a win. I've been demonstrating this to clients since the days of the Z-8 and 6502, and have continued to with the Pentium III and Athlon. I still do Z-80 work now and then. The wizardry one can do on the bare metal with a 1 GHz 32-bit CPU is simply mind boggling. (I can hardly wait for the new 64-bitters.) And when you're doing intense pattern matching in ANY environment -- including BSD -- the results are amazing. I've given people 500x (that's 500x, not 500%) speedups over their old, creaky Perl scripts. (The client in one case thought that his Web app was unscalable; it was still slow after he distributed it among a whole rack of servers. Now, he has all of these extra CPUs that are just loafing along....) --Brett "You're not just e-mailing her, you're e-mailing anyone she's ever e-mailed." -- Dayton Daily News Cartoonist Mike Peters To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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