I will think about this post every time I hear the expression "it won't change things one bit".
We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
161–170 of 359 posts
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#162Non-power-of-2 sizes are awkward from a hardware perspective. A lot of designs for e.g. optimized multipliers depend on the operands being divisible into halves; that doesn't work with units of 9 bits. It's also nice to be able to describe a bit position using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 0-7 in 3 bits, 0-31 in 5 bits, 0-63 in 6 bits), e.g. to represent a number of bitwise shift operations, or to select a bit from a…
Author here. It's true that you'd need one more bit to represent a bit position in a word, like for shifts, but we're already vastly over-provisioned; even in 64-bit registers we're only using six of eight bits. (Plus, in a lot of places we'd have that extra bit around!)
Some hardware circuits are a bit nicer with power-of-two sizes but I don't think it's a huge difference, and hardware has to include weird stuff like 24-bit and 53-bit multipliers for floating-point anyway (which in this alternate world would be probably 28-bit and 60-bit?). Not sure a few extra gates would be a dealbreaker.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#163Non-power-of-2 sizes are awkward from a hardware perspective. A lot of designs for e.g. optimized multipliers depend on the operands being divisible into halves; that doesn't work with units of 9 bits. It's also nice to be able to describe a bit position using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 0-7 in 3 bits, 0-31 in 5 bits, 0-63 in 6 bits), e.g. to represent a number of bitwise shift operations, or to select a bit from a…
Factorio logic applies as always - powers of 2 for trains belts etc. makes evenly splitting resources trivial.
Unfortunately belt speed gain per tier is linear and 1:3 blue:yellow belt.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them Or because IPv6 was not a simple "add more bits to address" but a much larger in-places-unwanted change.
I've run IPv6 on both corporate and home networks. Whether or not the additions were merited, they are not a formidable challenge for any reasonably-skilled admin. So no, I don't think that the reason you gave suffices as an excuse for why so many still refuse to deploy IPv6.
It's definitely more of an education issue. I still run into "IT" people that instinctively disable IPv6 no matter what. How do we fix this? The sad thing is IPv6 is actually easier in many respects: subnetting is simpler, no NAT hackery, SLAAC...
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#165Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many…
Author here. Actually I doubt we'd have picked 27-bit addresses. That's about 134M addresses; that's less than the US population (it's about the number of households today?) and Europe was also relevant when IPv4 was being designed.
In any case, if we had chosen 27-bit addresses, we'd have hit exhaustion just a bit before the big telecom boom that built out most of the internet infrastructure that holds back transition today. Transitioning from 27-bit to I don't know 45-bit or 99-bit or whatever we'd choose next wouldn't be as hard as the IPv6 transition today.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#166Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many…
LLM dren also isn't going to provide anything on how wildly different the home computer revolution would have been with twice as big character ROMs; the personal computer revolution would have been with twice as big code pages 437, 850, and 1252 and an extra CGA attribute bit; the BBS era would have been with 9N1 telecommunications; ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 would have been with space for the C1 control characters with no…
Author here. Really great comment; I've linked it from the OP. (Could do without the insults!) Most of the changes you point out sound... good? Maybe having fewer arbitrary limits would have sapped a few historically significant coders of their rage against the machine, but maybe it would have pulled in a few more people by being less annoying in general. On colors, I did mention that in the post but losing an alpha channel would be painful.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#167> But in a world with 9-bit bytes IPv4 would have had 36-bit addresses, about 64 billion total. Or we would have had 27 bit addresses and ran into problems sooner.
Author here. I kind of doubt it. Copied from a comment earlier:
I doubt we'd have picked 27-bit addresses. That's about 134M addresses; that's less than the US population (it's about the number of households today?) and Europe was also relevant when IPv4 was being designed. In any case, if we had chosen 27-bit addresses, we'd have hit exhaustion just a bit before the big telecom boom that built out most of the internet infrastructure that holds back transition today. Transitioning from 27-bit to I don't know 45-bit or 99-bit or whatever we'd choose next wouldn't be as hard as the IPv6 transition today.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them Or because IPv6 was not a simple "add more bits to address" but a much larger in-places-unwanted change.
If you "simply" added more bits to IPv4, you'd have a transition every bit (ahaha, ahem, sorry) as complex as the transition to IPv6 anyway, because IPv4+ would be a new protocol in exactly the same way as IPv6. A new DNS response record. Updates to routing protocols. New hardware. New software. And no interoperability between the two without stateful network address translation.
Author here. The point is that with 9-bit bytes we'd have designed IPv4 to have 36-bit addresses from the beginning. There wouldn't have been a transition.
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#169This is just an argument for longer roads and can kicking. He thanks ChatGPT for "discussions, research, and drafting". A real friend would have talked him out of posting this.
[flagged]
Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
#17010-bit bytes would also be tempting, as 1024 is so close to 1000 and it would make bytes follow an orders of magnitude progression. It would just be so much easier on mental arithmetic too.