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Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

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Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#201

Post by beckingz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #190
slver wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too late to (re)define GIF. Actually software which edits animated GIFs doesn't have to crash per se, it's all about how smartly it's implemented, and because GIF editing isn't exactly a sprawling industry, most apps tend to be, well, not that smart, and so edge cases can get them.

Formats don't have to be fully implemented to their original spec for all time. If it's not serving us well today then we can change how our software uses it.

Wouldn't it be better to make a new specification that provides backwards compatibility?

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#202

Post by mumblemumble »

vanderZwan wrote: post #184
stsquad wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 64bit Aarch64 ISA has very little in common with the original ISA from '85.

It makes about as much sense as calling humans "lactating fish"

Where the category "fish" isn't a clade - it's possible to evolve to no longer be a fish - it's more comparable to a specific generation of ARM chips, like perhaps ARM32, than it is to the ARM line in general. It would be weird to say "64-bit ARMv5" in the same way that it would be weird to say "lactating fish". But it is not weird to say "64-bit ARM" for the same reason it isn't weird to say "lactating euteleostome."

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#203

Post by Wowfunhappy »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #190
slver wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too late to (re)define GIF. Actually software which edits animated GIFs doesn't have to crash per se, it's all about how smartly it's implemented, and because GIF editing isn't exactly a sprawling industry, most apps tend to be, well, not that smart, and so edge cases can get them.

Formats don't have to be fully implemented to their original spec for all time. If it's not serving us well today then we can change how our software uses it.

They kind of do, though, or you lose compatibility.

There are a lot of corners of the internet which just haven’t been touched in a decade. Are you going to break all of them? For what purpose?

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#204

Post by greyhair »

halikular wrote: post #185
rob74 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes…

We're getting open source RISC-V wich seems more promising long term than ARM.

We'll see. ARM architecture is now about 36 years old. I believe RISC V originated about 10 years ago. I think MIPS started about 40 years ago, but I believe it has finally ground to a stop.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#205

Post by bluGill »

simias wrote: post #155
ulzeraj wrote: post #106

Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.

Back then code was usually closely tied to the hardware with very little abstraction. Nowadays even if you write in a low level language it's not difficult to target a wide array of devices if you go through standard interfaces. Proprietary software is probably the main reason we haven't had a whole lot of diversity in ISAs over the past couple of decades (see: Itanium). It's no coincidence that ARM's mainstream expl…

Back then C was a high level language. Programmers regularly dropped down to assembly (or even raw machine bytes) when they needed the best performance. Now C is considered low level and compilers can optimize much better than you can in almost all cases so more programmers are only vaugly aware of assembly.

Though you are correct, a lot of abstraction today makes things portable in ways that in the past they were not. The abstraction has a small performance and memory cost which wouldn't have been acceptable now, but today it is in the noise (cache misses are much more important and good abstractions avoid them)

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#206

Post by [deleted] »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #190
slver wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too late to (re)define GIF. Actually software which edits animated GIFs doesn't have to crash per se, it's all about how smartly it's implemented, and because GIF editing isn't exactly a sprawling industry, most apps tend to be, well, not that smart, and so edge cases can get them.

Formats don't have to be fully implemented to their original spec for all time. If it's not serving us well today then we can change how our software uses it.

[deleted]

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#207

Post by greyhair »

simias wrote: post #155
ulzeraj wrote: post #106

Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.

Back then code was usually closely tied to the hardware with very little abstraction. Nowadays even if you write in a low level language it's not difficult to target a wide array of devices if you go through standard interfaces. Proprietary software is probably the main reason we haven't had a whole lot of diversity in ISAs over the past couple of decades (see: Itanium). It's no coincidence that ARM's mainstream expl…

ARM's first explosion was in PDAs, not running Linux. SA110 and XScale.

A ton of ARM hardware is embedded cores running VxWorks or EmBed. M0 through M4. Yes, Phones are the dominant core consumer here, but there is a whole bunch of embedded/IoT stuff shipping ARM cores every day that will never see Linux installed.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#208

Post by aequitas »

ulzeraj wrote: post #106

Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.

My bet is we will have a small explosion of cheap consumer laptops running ARM, but more as a marketing ploy to ride the hype train around Apple computers with ARM better being much better than Intel. (even though those ARM chips won't compare to the Apple Silicon, but like I said, sales).

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#209

Post by saati »

leecarraher wrote: post #183
rob74 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes…

powerpc/IBM is still a big player in the server/HP computing market. They do many cool things with their architectures since cost is less of a factor(dynamic smp, switcheable endieness, OMI) but they suck to build code for from an out-of-box experience standpoint.

That's POWER, a different ISA, there are still some PowerPC embedded cpus but it's just slowly dying.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#210

Post by als0 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #198
stsquad wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 64bit Aarch64 ISA has very little in common with the original ISA from '85.

I gather that it's true that ARM hasn't been as good about backwards compatibility as some of its competitors, but was ARMv8 really so much of a jump from ARMv7 that one can't count it as part of the same line of processors anymore?

It is a jump. There is plenty to dislike about ARMv7.
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