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From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2022 17:40:54 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20230101014054.GD5825@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKr6gn1b=JoNm-9a3iPrHr4QeOzLGFD=Zy6E47YXi6fX4ZGoaA@mail.gmail.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

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

  reply	other threads:[~2023-01-01  1:41 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-12-30 18:25 [TUHS] " Paul Ruizendaal
2022-12-30 18:56 ` [TUHS] " Steve Nickolas
2022-12-31 14:59 ` Dan Cross
2022-12-31 19:08   ` Clem Cole
2022-12-31 21:10     ` Dan Cross
2022-12-31 21:39       ` Clem Cole
2022-12-31 21:52         ` Dan Cross
2022-12-31 23:25         ` Dave Horsfall
2023-01-01  1:02           ` Rob Pike
2023-01-01  1:16             ` George Michaelson
2023-01-01  1:40               ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2023-01-01  2:29                 ` Warner Losh
2023-01-01  1:24             ` Larry McVoy
2022-12-31 22:38       ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-12-31 22:55         ` Marc Donner
2023-01-01  3:55         ` Dan Cross
2023-01-01 20:29         ` Paul Ruizendaal
2023-01-01 21:26           ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-01-01 21:31             ` Rob Pike
2022-12-31 21:11     ` Paul Ruizendaal
2022-12-31 20:02   ` Paul Ruizendaal
2022-12-31 21:04     ` Warner Losh
2022-12-31 21:41     ` Dan Cross
2023-01-01  3:08     ` Warner Losh
2023-01-01  4:40       ` Dan Cross
2023-01-01  8:05     ` Jonathan Gray

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