Viewing profile — cliffbean

Why are we measuring performance in MIPS?

Little-endian is generally better for compilers, to the extent that it matters. For example, with SIMD, it makes most sense to number the lanes in the same direction as addresses i…

I take a pragmatic approach. I'm cool with BSD license for most of user-level application code, because if someone wants to make a binary-only application, I usually have options I…

They appear to be doing "take, modify, distribute as a compiled binary blob that no one else can modify and pass around". It's hard to reconcile that with the word "share".

Normal division by zero gives you Infinity. To get NaN, you have to do something as numerically confounding as divide zero by zero, which isn't any infinity, because the numerator …

I distinguish between proprietary apps and proprietary kernel. The open source world can build its own apps. Mostly. However, it can't build its own kernel if the hardware is undoc…

While most people don't hack kernel code themselves, there is still value in promoting open source operating systems. A future in which Windows becomes popular on mobile/embedded d…

The current leaders of the LLVM project intend to keep it open. They have also traded away a way to encourage others to keep it open in return for wider adoption. Interpret that as…

We don't need any networks. Self driving cars will always need to be able to share the road with normal cars. That mechanism will support the case of sharing the road with other se…

The argument is that self-driving cars would reuse existing roads, fuel, service, and manufacturing infrastructures that have been developed for existing cars. And, adoption can be…

SIGABRT (or similar) approach is similarly tempting. No checking for errors, no complicated control paths. If Unix systems let processes register (and unregister) files to be autom…

They're coming. The initial code for them is written; it's just waiting for a few other things to get checked in first. Also, quite a lot of people use floats for every data value.…

One thing I struggle with: how does one calibrate one's spidey sense? Reading comments in online forums is likely to bias one towards the people talking the most, which is not a go…

I find perf a very useful tool, and use it frequently. At the same time, I don't see how your data supports your conclusion that perf is more effective than cachegrind here. The ab…

If you're going to argue against taxi licenses or anything else, please explain why you think the reasons why some people believe the good outweighs the bad are wrong, rather than …

You're right that the first link I posted is a research paper, and that it should be interpreted accordingly. It is interesting though that in the paper, they compare NaCl to other…

Your history omits an earlier chapter, which was the period during which Google introduced NaCl to the world. http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34913.pdf (2009) http://blog.c…

This article does have aspects that could be reasonably criticized. But we can have some fun trading rhetorical devices too. I see your Dismissive Tone and raise you a Gentle Mock.…

I don't understand this kind of sarcasm except as a way to insinuate an opinion without having to defend it. The article cites numerous sources.

> [It's fine. And besides, everyone else is doing it.] Fact-checking posts that cite their sources and speak calmly about relevant topics are useful.

There probably is close to zero overhead in a small benchmark. Hardware branch prediction is indeed good. However, it's a finite resource. In a large application, lots of needless …

Perhaps, but how important is DRM , with Chrome shipping it and even promoting it , to you, personally? Less important than having a nice startup time? Whatever floats your boat, b…

It is generic, but the graphs on arewefastyet.com suggest that it isn't actually making most regular benchmarks go faster, just some of the asm.js-style ones.

It's unclear. Diversity helps innovation, but it also adds complexity to everyone who builds on top of it. If there's room for significant innovation, it can be worth the complexit…

This document lists some reasons [0] • Growing interest in running entire OS in little-endian mode – Ease porting of programs from other architectures – Ease porting of programs wh…