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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c9bd72123c9b0d9c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: BiiN system Date: 1996/07/17 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 169506910 references: <2.2.32.19960716060723.00688abc@mail.cts.com> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-07-17T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Dave said "With 20-20 hindsite, the BiiN machine would have been a perfect platform for "modern" OO languages, such as Ada95, C++ or Eiffel. It's a damn shame that the corporation couldn't make it work." I disagree, it was not ahead of its time, it was behind its time. It represented a trend in CISC design thinking that at this stage I think has been effectively discredited. The 432 itself was clearly an impossible design (and the performance of the initial silicon was, as one would expect, truly dreadful, and I doubt even Intel with all its techniques for making crufty CISC designs chug along at a respectable speed, could have rescued it. In many ways the 432 represented the direction of the VAX extended even further, and it is interesting to note that DEC itself did NOT make the mistake of attempting to do that. Furthermore, it is likely that Intel itself will make a major shift at some point (after all the P6 is really nothing but a pretty standard RISC machine with a clever front end for translating 32-bit x86 code reasonably fast and efficiently -- it is really rather extraordinary that we have a nice machine at the heart of the p6, which would be much easier to generate good code for, but instead the compiler has to struggle away generating junk x86 instructions, which are then converted back to reasonable RISC code at runtime. The workings of the marketplace and he demands of backwards compatibility sure create some odd technical monstrosities :-)