71–76 of 76 posts
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...designed and implemented the whole ARM instruction set in her head... Wow! With today's CPUs you probably wouldn't stand a chance, no matter how good you are.
On the contrary. Just because x86 is a baroque monstrosity doesn't mean simple, powerful ISAs are unpossible.
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On the contrary. Just because x86 is a baroque monstrosity doesn't mean simple, powerful ISAs are unpossible.
I can only agree as to the baroque monstrosity. Let me put it another way: Could she do it with comparable ease on today's ARM CPUs?
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Windows and Mac OS were both cooperatively multitasking until 1995 and 2001, although they did have more memory protection than RISC OS. As to the worldview, everyone had their own worldview before the internet, / vs \ vs : vs . Mac OS Classic had filetypes, same as RISC OS. Bit odd that the web uses them really, considering it has mimetypes. The RISC OS GUI is still miles ahead of everyone else. Its application pack…
Not until 2k/xp finally retired the 9x/DOS line did Windows "work". 9x was just so finicky that you didn't really want to push the multitasking.
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That wouldn't surprise me at all. And the really staggering thing is how little the ARM's design and instruction set has changed since then. The fact that you can use Peter Cockerell's 1980-something tutorial on ARM ASM even today shows how well it was designed. I put it up there with such quality-without-a-name pieces of engineering like the SR-71, the HP-12C and the Leica M3.
The SR-71 was so far ahead of its time, it's a little ridiculous. Look down/shoot down capability in the mid 1960s. Synthetic aperture radar mapping. An IMU/astronavigation system almost as capable as the early GPS units of a few decades later. An airframe that actually becomes stronger the more you fly it as designed. Thermal management system techniques that weren't used elsewhere for decades. I can keep going. But…
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That wouldn't surprise me at all. And the really staggering thing is how little the ARM's design and instruction set has changed since then. The fact that you can use Peter Cockerell's 1980-something tutorial on ARM ASM even today shows how well it was designed. I put it up there with such quality-without-a-name pieces of engineering like the SR-71, the HP-12C and the Leica M3.
Oh, without a doubt. ARM assembly is a joy to code, much more so than any other. It just feels... right. There's no fluff and cruft and, at the same time, it didn't feel like there was anything really missing. RISC processors have a reputation for poor code density, but the ARM, even when it came out originally, was the exception to that rule: it was pretty easy to get code density for the ARM comparable to that of t…