speed

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/6/30 Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org>:
>  > Hi Frank,
> >
> > Your project seems interesting. I'd like to know more. Any links? Papers?
> >
> > I need to learn a lot of ick stuff really fast and unfortunately that
> stuff
> > is really icky, yup the ick is a number of very large monster C/C++
> systems
> > with tons of core assembly thrown in for extra fun. Some custom
> > visualizations like I've done for learning monster Smalltalk systems will
> > save a lot of time.
> >
> > I'm into accelerated learning of detailed systems using the visual cortex
> of
> > our brains since the human visual system has massive bandwidth that word
> > based and auditory thought channels lack, although I suppose one could
> > convert large systems into a symphony. Anyway visual representations of
> > large systems can help in quickly learning about how they are constructed
> > and identify where one needs to focus extra attention.
> >
> > On a recent large Smalltalk project the visual map required about eight
> feet
> > by three feet just to map out the connections between the larger object
> > assemblies. It helped provide an overview of the system. Programmers
> who'd
> > been working with the system for years had no idea that it was shaped
> that
> > way.
> >
> > There is a video from a few years back on Channel 9 over at ick,
> Microsoft,
> > where they tell of a very large map of their 5,000 + DLLs for XP. They
> built
> > it by reading the raw DLLs and determining the links between them all.
> They
> > consider their OS a fractured system living in these DLLs which we know
> as
> > DLL Hell. It's a Hell for them too! Ah, the fun of eating your own
> > technology. They found redundant code (sometimes 12+ copies of the same
> > function which leads to all sorts of fun fixing bugs and providing
> security
> > patches) and were better able to reduce their icky factor a little making
> XP
> > more stable and less tangled that their prior systems.
> >
> > Aside from the visualization aspect I'd like to computer the System
> > Brittleness Factor (LSBF) for each system to see how rigid or flexible
> the
> > code base is. This helps identify where it can be improved and where code
> > can be shrunk by increasing flexibility through merging of
> methods/classes
> > that really are similar. As we know C/C++ code is more "rigid" due to
> it's
> > use of typed variables which very strictly limits the object flow paths
> > through the program. Even with C++ Templates which enables a measure of
> > polymorphism for C++ programs the rigidity can be measured. Typically the
> > code needed for a system expands when typed variables are added. This is
> a
> > problem for many reasons including comprehension due to the increased
> brain
> > bandwidth required to simply read the ick.
> >
> > Also for the other reasons I stated in the earlier emails: "All your
> > languages and systems belong to us [Smalltalk Style Systems]." The sCurge
> of
> > C based systems has been with us way to long, it's time to take back the
> > night and the day. ;-) Gotta have fun...
> >
> > Check out the awesome work of LLVM. http://www.LLVM.org<http://www.llvm.org/>.
> Runtime Dynamic
> > Recompiled on the Fly C based systems on the way and in part financed by
> > Apple. Liberation from GCC is on the horizon. Imagine a Squeak that can
> > recompile it's VM on the fly and then "hop" over to the new one dropping
> the
> > old version from memory!!! We do this all the time in Smalltalk, it'll be
> > nice for C to finally catch up after four decades! It's also nice to see
> a
> > vendor like Apple attempting to bring this capability to their C based
> > operating systems and applications technologies.
> >
>
> If you able to compile things at run time, then why compiling C at all?
> See Exupery & friends.
>
> > All the best,
> >
> > Peter
> >
> > [ | peter at smalltalk dot org ]
> >
> > ps. Ick is a technical term referring to the ick factor of a system. Ick
> is
> > the opposite of elegant, beauty, simplicity. I work to identify ick and
> > remove it from systems when possible or simply to fix the ick so that it
> > doesn't stop a system from working.
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Igor Stasenko AKA sig.
>
>


-- 
David Zmick
/dz0004455\
http://dz0004455.googlepages.com
http://dz0004455.blogspot.com
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