From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9
From: geoff@collyer.net
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <20020226112819.1E46B19A1C@mail.cse.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 03:24:08 -0800
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 56282656-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

John Mashey (of AT&T then MIPS then SGI then MIPS and now Sensei
Partners) gave talks at the University of Toronto in the 1980s on the
MIPS architecture and why it would kill the evil 386 archtitecture.
At one of his early talks, he talked about the lengths that the MIPS
optimiser could go to because of customer demand (`some of our
customers will perform hideous obscenities for another 5%' is the
quote I recall, though it might have been 10%, it's been a while).  He
said that the MIPS C compiler at that time was 250,000 lines of source
(presumably C). At a later talk, the size had grown to 500,000 lines.
So I wouldn't be surprised if enormous amounts of code are expended on
seemingly minor details.