[TUHS] Re: Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

All true except for the Forth choice.  It's as bad, maybe worse, as 
choosing Tcl for your language.  I've written a ton of Tcl but I
need the Tk GUI part so I put up with Tcl to get it.  I'd never 
push Tcl as a language that other people had to use.  Same thing
with Forth.

I dunno what I'd pick, Perl in the old days, Python now (not that
I care for Python but everyone can program it).  Just pick something
that is trivial for someone to pick up.

On Sun, Jan 01, 2023 at 11:16:16AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
> A counter argument which will be well understood as self-justifying if made
> by a boot rom specialist:
> 
> Every machine I make winds up looking a bit different. The new bus has
> different logic. The chip initialisation differs. Blobs become more
> interestingly hard to handle because associated pre boot initialisation
> dependency keeps rising and no amount of push back from me stops it.
> 
> If I make my boot ROM forth, I can reduce my marginal costs to writing
> forth code for most variant handling and occasional uplift of new
> primitives and constants into the forth for edge cases. My life gets
> simpler if I implement the wheel of life.
> 
> I would imagine after the 10th sub variant, one would wind up thinking like
> this.
> 
> Of course a rational alternative is to maintain a monrepo of all the
> variants and recompile all of them all the time to make all the boot ROMs
> far smaller. But making the generic anything ROM and changing only some
> forth would be attractive.
> 
>  Never owned this problem. I did work with two groups doing lsi-11 images
> for x.25 handling on yorkbox, and they definitely thought more like you
> than me on this: hand code it, code it well, they aren't general purpose
> devices when doing this kind of job. (I annoyed them a lot which tends to
> "probably they were right" in hindsight on my part)
> 
> G

-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat