Dynabook hw cost

subbukk subbukk at gmail.com
Sat Jun 2 14:40:41 UTC 2007


On Tuesday 29 May 2007 11:18 pm, subbukk wrote:
> Building a 20KLOC monolith would definitely be a challenge. Unix kernel was
> only around 6K lines of C when it started. TinyCC (circa 2004), a
> bootloader that compiles Linux kernel on the fly and runs it, is about 7500
> lines of C. The issue here is not one of space or speed constraints but one
> of verifying correctness of such a monolith within engineering tolerances.
Let me clarify what I meant since the way I phrased the sentence is ambiguous. 
I am not claiming that dynabook software can be built in less than 20KLOC. If 
our basic unit of assembly is a line of code, then putting together 20K of 
them reliably in a way that millions could use it is indeed a challenge. Just 
like Smalltalk/Lisp unburdened programmers from tracking memory allocs/frees, 
we need better abstractions and separation of concerns. Instead of 20KLOC, 
the problem could be factored into two systems of 5-7K each to make it 
tractable.

Regards .. Subbu



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