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Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs



At Mon, 1 Jun 2015 14:47:39 -0400, Andrew Cagney <andrew.cagney%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs
> 
> GNU, this is from the GNU coding standard; to me it explains some of
> the design choices I find in many GNU utilities:
> 
> "For example, Unix utilities were generally optimized to minimize
> memory use; if you go for speed instead, your program will be very
> different. You could keep the entire input file in memory and scan it
> there instead of using stdio. Use a smarter algorithm discovered more
> recently than the Unix program. Eliminate use of temporary files. Do
> it in one pass instead of two (we did this in the assembler). "

Heh.  Yeah, those were the days.

Ironically "gcc" still has "-pipe", and it's still not the default, even
on systems where only a GNU assembler (or equiv.) will be used.

I think whomever wrote that (likely RMS) was thinking we all were going
to be working on Multics or its moral equivalent.

That reminds me though.... I've had some ideas of how one might
implement stdio solely using memory mapped I/O (which I was thinking of
more for the purpose of how one might support POSIX on a Multics-like
system, but perhaps it has advantages for a Unix-y system with memmap).

Of course if one were actually implementing for a virtual memory based
system like Multics then one would not use silly old stdio and other
file stream abstractions -- there's just no point to contort all one's
algorithms into that corset of an abstraction.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods
						Planix, Inc.

<woods%planix.com@localhost>       +1 250 762-7675        http://www.planix.com/

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