Excessive optimization (was Re: what was VMS/OpenVMS written in?)

On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 17:32 -0500, Ethan Dicks wrote: I've had some fun doing Protected Mode on Bochs, in 80386 mode. Bit too masochistic for my liking, though... Thankfully the Motorola 68K is a bit easier to deal with (I've been learning that while debugging the 3B1 emulator)... My current love affair is with 'soft' (FPGA-implemented) CPUs. I've been playing with Lattice's "LatticeMico32" CPU core on an Altera FPGA board (and an Enterpoint Drigmorn2 Xilinx devboard, just for good measure) and the assembly language for that is like a dream come true. It's almost completely orthogonal, opcodes do what their names say... you could probably use it to teach a computer architecture class. The GNU assembler is a piece of cack, but a few hours spent with Flex, Bison and GCC should produce a workable assembler. Tack on a modification of an old C preprocessor and hey, you've got ifdefs and macros! Yeah, I'm a RISC fanboy (as evidenced by the MIPS books on my bookshelf). From memory, LM32 has 64 instruction codes (several of which are unused) versus the several thousand on the 32-bit X86/MMX/SSE/SIMD/3DNOW platform. I have nothing but the utmost respect for any programmer good enough to write (or maintain) a *good* compiler or operating system for the X86 platform.... -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/