From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,e17a4d5bc0d42b86 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-02-02 19:49:14 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-01!supernews.com!newshub2.rdc1.sfba.home.com!news.home.com!news2.rdc2.tx.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3A7B8123.7A1B80B9@home.com> From: "Larry J. Elmore" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.0-test11 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada and JVM? Why not AdaVM? References: <94vdt9$a2g1@news.cis.okstate.edu> <957b5d$fji6p$1@ID-25716.news.dfncis.de> <3A79FE73.3D7F12A0@home.com> <95da8h$13s$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 03:49:14 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.10.25.74 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news2.rdc2.tx.home.com 981172154 65.10.25.74 (Fri, 02 Feb 2001 19:49:14 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 19:49:14 PST Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:4906 Date: 2001-02-03T03:49:14+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote: > In article <3A79FE73.3D7F12A0@home.com>, > "Larry J. Elmore" wrote: > > > Unfortunately, it's failure was also perceived by many to > > also be the failure of the ideas behind the architecture. > > Entirely fair, the design was misconceived It's been a _long_ time since I've read anything detailed on the 432, but it seemed to me that some of its ideas had merit -- at least if your goal was safety and reliability, not speed. Whether that might be better done by software I honestly don't know. > > The 432 might not have been a stellar performer even with the best > possible implementation of the > > architecture > > Indeed. Yes, I should have said _could not_, not "might not". > > > but a lot of truly terrible decisions were made in its actual > > implementation that effectively crippled it. > > Nothing could have rescued it in my opinion. The design had the > appearence of being done by high level language folks with no > view of what could be implemented efficiently. Then those who implemented the hardware made things even worse. > There was really > nothing specifically Ada about the design. Custom microcode could be provided, though. I remember reading an article about a 432 with microcode specifically written to support Smalltalk's VM. I don't specifically recall what the performance was, but the combination of the 432 and Smalltalk must've been truly glacial... Larry