From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Martin C.Atkins To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9 Message-Id: <20020301135745.706f318b.martin@mca-ltd.com> In-Reply-To: <65cb447dbaf5f9da39d670e4f0596c79@plan9.bell-labs.com> References: <65cb447dbaf5f9da39d670e4f0596c79@plan9.bell-labs.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 13:57:45 +0530 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5cbd2db8-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.