From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 13:17:36 -0400
From: rob@plan9.research.att.com rob@plan9.research.att.com
Subject: Why compile.c ?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 01c88d5a-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19940419171736.0DRYq0DJCEWPSwRW8WyEdCek8pMv5dObVWA3yLNd0kk@z>

Why?  Why do by hand what a machine can do just
as well or better?

The SPARC MMU is inexcusably badly designed.
To make a single kernel that supports all variants
one must either write oodles of ugly assembly code,
with loops that must be unrolled for speed, or generate
code at boot-time tailored to the machine at hand.
We chose the latter approach because it's really
less code to maintain.  I wrote the compiler in just
a couple of hours one afternoon.  It's very easy stuff.

Since some of the code must be generated - for
example, cache line sizes vary from model to model -
what the hell?  Why not generate it all?  Easy, and
susceptible to adaptation as SUN's creative minds
continue to design hardware.