Viewing profile — p_l

IIRC not compiled (you can include the interpreter). But then Scheme was always less EVAL-friendly of the lisps

Linux actually has pretty long history of userspace drivers, and multiple kernel drivers have as their main if not only logic a way to link hardware interface with userspace app, o…

The part where Windows applications built with C++ generally do not share C++ ABI DLLs with each other and the operating system except for certain well isolated ones is major part …

Additionally a lot of the APIs if you go underneath, including native code components, are exposed through few variants of Binder (BeOS-derived IPC for the uninitiated) including u…

More like the specific design of a vtable

Every new API since around NT5.2/6.0 era had to get explicit waiver to be provided as anything other than COM interface. Some additionally have weird hybridization going on IIRC th…

Unaligned access was common issue on many RISCs, which depending on specific Unix variant and runtime settings might mean regularly getting SIGBUS for code ported from other archit…

Arguably the ECL was just digging themselves deeper, the real failure was upper management fighting any suggestion that VAX has played out and should be replaced. EDIT: Then there'…

Seeing Postgres articles from Snowflake surprises me a lot though given how there's zero relation between Snowflake the product and Postgres itself EDIT: I now see it's mainly to d…

Another somewhat related error in strategy was trying to keep VAX alive for longer than it should have been, especially the ECL versions

The funny part is that arguably both HyperTransport and QPI descend from the interprocessor links designed for Alpha EV7

An important thing to consider is that DEC simply didn't have enough CPU design teams, which is also why Alpha essentially had only one-and-half model in the works throughout its h…

FWIW Alpha pretty quickly went with mainly PCI + few legacy ISA slots for considerable chunk of the line, unlike competition which used proprietary buses that might have been faste…

The issue was not that Alpha ISA was impossible to scale down. The issue was that DEC lacked the resources to run a completely new microarchitecture design to target low-power plat…

Decision to cease support was reputedly done by Compaq, coming as complete surprise to both Compaq-side and Microsoft-side NT teams. As for Alpha, funnily enough the first few year…

Thinking longer about Alpha's imprecise faults made me realize that signaling NaNs can be quite useful in such case

That's the real problem with AGPL, IMO - it encourages copyright assignment to a corporate entity so it can launder it through dual-licensing

Yes, I agree it does a lot of heavy lifting there. Honestly that's why it needs to both have strict liabilities on operators/developers (no more "computer said so but computer can'…

Because a computer can handle 100s of such calls simultaneously. Similarly, I worked on a system that used AI for approvals of payment for medical activities (in Germany) - it only…

FX!32 was good compared to what was available elsewhere (including for Itanium IIRC). I am not saying it had to compete with fully with x86 on consumer desktops from beginning, but…

I somewhat suspect that if not for multiple materials (not from MS) promoting deep dependency on IBM PC specifics, it might have worked out.

Windows on Alpha and FX!32 were reasonably solid options, as was the general health of the Alpha ecosystem. The platform also was not overextended in dot-com boom as much as let's …

IIRC it was major part of intel's roadmap to establish it so that "future" of PC cpus would be locked down to Intel/HP partnership. And back then VIA was still noticeable competito…

EV7 were introduced after customers refused to upgrade to Integrity over crap performance.

Itanium was essentially (incompatible) PA-RISC 3 - it originated as HP project and the direction to totally replace HPPA with Itanium was there from the start. Non-Stop got ported …