[TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

[jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com (Jason Stevens)]

Wow BSD on a supercomputer!  That sounds pretty cool! 

http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1986/3445600639931.pdf

From here it mentions it could scale to 16 process execution modules
(CPU's?) 

while here http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/comphist/hist.html it mentions 4 PEMs
which each could run 8 processes.

It still looks like an amazing machine.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ronald Natalie
To: Noel Chiappa
Cc: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: 10/27/14 11:09 PM
Subject: Re: [TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

We thought the kernels got cleaned up a lot by the time we got to the
BSD releases.    We were wrong.
When porting our variant of the 4 BSD to the Denelcor HEP supercomputer
we found a rather amusing failure.

The HEP was a 64 bit word machine but it had partial words of 16 and 32
bits.   The way it handled these was to encode the word size in the
lower bits of the address (since the bottom three weren't used in word
addressing anyhow).    If the bottom three were zero, then it was the
full word.  If it was 2 or 6, it was the left or right half word, and
1,3, 5, and 7 yielded the four quarter words.  (Byte operations used
different instructions so they directly addressed the memory).

Now Mike Muuss who did the C compiler port made sure that all the casts
did the right thing.   If you cast "int *" to "short *" it would tweak
the low order bits to make things work.    However the BSD kernel in
several places did what I call conversion by union:  essentially this:

union carbide {
     char*  c;
     short* s;
     int*     i;
} u;

u.s  = ...some valid short* ...
int* ip = u.i;

Note the compiler has no way of telling that you are storing and
retrieving through different union members and hence the low order bits
ended up reflecting the wrong word size and this led to some flamboyant
failures.     I then spent a week running around the kernel making these
void* and fixing up all the access points to properly cast the accesses
to it.

The other amusing thing was what to call the data types.     Since this
was a word machine, there was a real predisposition to call the 64 bit
sized thing "int" but that meant we needed another typename for the 32
bit thing (since we decided to leave short for the 16 bit integer).
I lobbied hard for "medium" but we ended up using int32.   Of course,
this is long before the C standards ended up reserving the _ prefix for
the implementation.

The afore mentioned fact that all the structure members shared the same
namespace in the original implementation is why the practice of using
letter prefixes on them (like b_flags and b_next etc... rather than just
flags or next) that persisted long after the C compiler got this issue
resolved.

Frankly, I really wish they'd have fixed arrays in C to be properly
functioning types at the same time they fixed structs to be proper types
as well.     Around the time of the typesetter or V7 releases we could
assign and return structs but arrays still had the silly "devolve into
pointers" behavior that persists unto this day and still causes problems
among the newbies.

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