Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9

[Martin C.Atkins <martin@mca-ltd.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002 10:22:23 -0500 presotto@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> I think 3B2 code deserves its own place in hell.  Poring over
> the ESS#5 code, someone found that there were lots of
> strcmp(p, "f(") == 0 checks (I may have gotten the exact
> string wrong but it's close).  It took us a while to figure
> out why.  Apparently, location 0 on the 3b had the 3 bytes
> 'f' '(' '\0', someone noticed that when programs blew up
> they were pointing to "f(", and the worlds most amazing
> kludge for detecting nil pointers was born.
> 

Thank god for Dennis's statement that this wasn't the 5ESS - one
replaced our local exchange just earlier this week! :-)
(and it broke things... Right now one of our lines is dead.
BTW: this is in India, *not* the UK, before people get confused
by my signature...)

> I heard a rumor yesterday that I'ld like dispelled if
> possible.  It was that the Linux kernel had to be compiled
> with optimization turned on to work.  I just tried compiling
> my Redhat system without and it crashed but then I
> turned optimization on and it still didn't work, so clearly
> I'm incompetent.

I'm sorry that I can't remember *any* attribution, but I thought it
was "common wisdom/knowledge" that gcc only really worked properly
with -O turned on. That the optimiser "optimised away the bugs put in
by the code generator". This is going back a few years, so it may be
things have "improved"?

Martin

-- 
Martin C. Atkins	martin@mca-ltd.com
Mission Critical Applications Ltd, U.K.