Re: GETF Speedup?
"David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com)" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.lispworks.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Well, early FFT’s on the POINT-4 (NOVA-800 replacement) - user MicroCoded and called directly from high level Forth. > On Oct 15, 2025, at 10:51, Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com) <[email protected]> wrote: > > If I had a pound for every time someone explained to me that machines I used were user-microcodable I would have many pounds. If I had a pound for every time someone showed me an example where that really helped things significantly for any length of time I would have the same number of pounds I have now. It didn't even make Lisp fast, at least compared to expending the same resource on compiler development would have. Hennessy and Patterson were right, it turns out. I am sure there is some famous example where user-written microcode made all the difference. > > The keyboard point is better: the Sun type ?3? keyboard was a lovely thing (I never had time for the crust of cokebottle keys that surrounded the spacecadet-derived keyboards). But you can get modern keyboards with good keyswitches and good layouts: I just am not willing to trade a laptop for something with a separate keyboard. > > It's like saying a sidevalve Aston Martin is a more lovely car to look at and drive than anything modern. It is. But I'd still like to drive an electric car with brakes that work and seatbelts, on the whole. > > I'll go further: LW, today, is an environment I find more pleasant to use than I ever did Genera. We're reminiscing about a partly-imaginary lost past which wasn't, in fact, better than the present. > > I know: heresy. > > --tim > >> On 14 Oct 2025, at 23:32, Bradford Miller (as bradford dot w dot miller at gmail dot com) <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Not everything. Vintage machines (not just LispMs) allowed user microprogramming, for example. And the Kulp keyboards were definitely better than anything commercially available today. And don’t get me started on everything we’ve had to give up in the name of “security”… >> >> Sure, even SBCL would blow an XL-1200 away on Gabriel Benchmarks. But there’s a large difference between desiderata for development v. deployment. >> >>> On Oct 14, 2025, at 4:55 PM, Tim Bradshaw <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> On 14 Oct 2025, at 20:53, Bradford Miller <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>> I never said there was. I’m just disappointed (?) that many such LispM ideas haven’t been preserved in current platforms. >>>> >>> >>> I miss LispMs in the same way I miss vintage sports cars: they were absurdly cool and fun ... but realistically everything (LW, say) is better today. >>> >>> (And yes, I used LispMs, and yes I've driven cars made a century ago.) >>> >>> --tim >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users >> [email protected] >> http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html