Dynabook hw cost
bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk
bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk
Thu May 24 19:33:34 UTC 2007
Ralph Johnson writes:
> The point of the thesis is that a lot of proposed hardware features
> don't help performance very much, and in fact there are software
> solutions that are more effective. This is a good point. However, it
> doesn't mean that no hardware features can help. Moreover, it assumes
> that hardware is expensive and software is cheap, and in fact the
> opposite is true. People have been working on a JIT compiler for
> Squeak for some time, and we aren't using one yet. It is easy to say
> "just put it in the compiler", but it might be too complex to ever get
> the compiler working.
But we've been making continuous progress towards a JIT for the
last few years. I doubt that finishing Exupery would cost anything
like what a modern high performance CPU costs to design. Exupery has
just started compiling in the background, a few bugs need to be fixed
before that's a safe way to run it. It is progressing.
Writing in Smalltalk is a good way to keep development costs down.
Bryce
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