Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

cs.cmu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 154 posts

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#131

Post by troupo »

djur wrote: post #118
Max-q wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the bloat has made many programs slower than they could be. Software is eating up the advances we get in hardware. Modern Word 365 is not any faster than Word 95 on a Pentium 66 in normal use. That is a ~100MHz computer with maybe 16MB RAM, and a rotating hard drive. Bloat making software bigger will in many cases also make it slower. Also, the UX on Windows 95 was consistent and easy to learn. Now, much softwa…

I see this sentiment again and again, but the Windows 95 experience I remember included frequent spinning hourglasses, blue screens of death from faulty drivers, everything grinding to a halt when memory is near exhaustion or files are being copied between disks, tons of third party applications (and even Microsoft applications, like Office) that disregarded the Windows UI standards, constantly having to run CHKDSK a…

Thing is, our computers are magnitudes of orders faster than 20-30 years ago. Why isn't our software orders of magnitudes faster? I'll settle for just 10 times faster.

If you take software from 20 years ago, and run it on modern hardware, it will be instant in most operations.

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#132

Post by musicale »

TillE wrote: post #54
Aurornis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from going back and using all of that old software exclusively. For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?

Binary size on a desktop OS is almost totally irrelevant in practice. Memory size matters a little more, but your OS will generally do a good job of loading what it needs (ie, huge binaries can still start quickly) and paging out what it doesn't. People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.

> Memory size matters a little more, but your OS will generally do a good job of loading what it needs (ie, huge binaries can still start quickly) and paging out what it doesn't.

And yet Electron apps often garnish that memory bloat and computational inefficiency with sluggish performance and a clunky user experience.

It's a shame when an 8GB Mac mini doesn't have enough RAM to run apps comfortably. Of course there's a bit of a corrupt bargain going on between bloated software and Apple since the latter wants to upsell you to a more expensive model.

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#133

Post by musicale »

Max-q wrote: post #90
TillE wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Binary size on a desktop OS is almost totally irrelevant in practice. Memory size matters a little more, but your OS will generally do a good job of loading what it needs (ie, huge binaries can still start quickly) and paging out what it doesn't. People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.

Well, the bloat has made many programs slower than they could be. Software is eating up the advances we get in hardware. Modern Word 365 is not any faster than Word 95 on a Pentium 66 in normal use. That is a ~100MHz computer with maybe 16MB RAM, and a rotating hard drive. Bloat making software bigger will in many cases also make it slower. Also, the UX on Windows 95 was consistent and easy to learn. Now, much softwa…

"What hardware giveth, software taketh away."

In the case of Apple, it's often Apple software eating up the benefits of Apple hardware.

Unfortunately subtle differences (such as improved reliability/security or a streamlined workflow) are lost in the computing market, where people are attracted to the new and shiny rather than the old and usable. Also designers like to mess with things.

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#134

Post by musicale »

gizajob wrote: post #99
Max-q wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the bloat has made many programs slower than they could be. Software is eating up the advances we get in hardware. Modern Word 365 is not any faster than Word 95 on a Pentium 66 in normal use. That is a ~100MHz computer with maybe 16MB RAM, and a rotating hard drive. Bloat making software bigger will in many cases also make it slower. Also, the UX on Windows 95 was consistent and easy to learn. Now, much softwa…

We need Stevesie to reincarnate and fire whoever is Scott-Forestall-ing it up this year.

I still think iOS was more fun in the Forstall-skeuomorphic era, and screen elements were easier to differentiate.

macOS icons also used to have distinct silhouettes which made them easier to distinguish, but now everything is a square tile. Screen controls which used to be visible and targetable are now hidden and are harder to hit when they do appear.

It feels like we are still under the tyranny of the (Jony Ivian?) streamlined aesthetic over usability and functionality, as if a library decided to organize books by size and color.

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#135

Post by Kwpolska »

LoganDark wrote: post #121
astrange wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AS memory compression is better as it's hardware accelerated. IIRC Windows doesn't like to overcommit memory and its allocation calls will actually fail instead, but I don't remember the details.

I think ASi Macs also use swap by default now, because the SSDs are so fast that it's actually a tenable solution to memory pressure. My Intel Mac never had any swap. > IIRC Windows doesn't like to overcommit memory and its allocation calls will actually fail instead Yeah... one of the reasons why I dislike it.

Intel Macs have swap too. You can check it in Activity Monitor: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/activity-monitor/actmn...

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#136

Post by bear8642 »

tom_ wrote: post #51

> "...And the lord said, 'lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'" Did it seriously not let you have a goto label inside a switch?! This seems like an odd restriction, as all 3 are the same kind of thing.

They're different enough that you can't goto a case or default label.

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#137

Post by DaanDL »

mastry wrote: post #52
omoikane wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> picture of a cat I couldn't find this elusive picture of a cat on archive.org, but I found this dog instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20030113144310/https://www.amazo... June 2016 appears to be when Amazon adopted the current error pages with the large dog images. https://web.archive.org/web/20160612232820/http://www.amazon...

Maybe this is it? http://telcontar.net/Screenshots/worldwidewonk/Amazon-404-eh...

I really like the look of that browser, which is it? Netscape?

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#138

Post by DaanDL »

layer8 wrote: post #83
xp84 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like AirPods and AirPods Pro when their 7 cents worth of batteries die! A perfect system.

That will have to change in 2027 with he new EU battery regulation.

Do they? I thought it was only iPhones. Either way, Apple will find a way out...

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#139

Post by Karellen »

TillE wrote: post #50
duskwuff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably looking for "#if 0" / "#endif".

Yeah it took me a while to adopt this common practice when I need to "comment out" a large block of code. Just use the preprocessor, it's much simpler.

FWIW, replacing comments with whitespace is also done by the preprocessor.

Re: Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

#140

Post by rescbr »

Pannoniae wrote: post #81
Aurornis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from going back and using all of that old software exclusively. For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?

I would love to, if things actually worked on it! Since everything is HTTPS now and you need TLS1.3 for many things, running very retro things for daily usage is next to impossible.

> very retro things

I wouldn't consider an iPad Mini 1st generation to be very retro, but I still need to run a MITM proxy for it to be able to browse Wikipedia(!).

Post reply on HN