From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 28896 invoked from network); 1 Jan 2023 01:41:22 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 1 Jan 2023 01:41:22 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9F7E94241B; Sun, 1 Jan 2023 11:40:58 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 88DFC4241A for ; Sun, 1 Jan 2023 11:40:54 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 4BBE135E92B; Sat, 31 Dec 2022 17:40:54 -0800 (PST) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2022 17:40:54 -0800 From: Larry McVoy To: George Michaelson Message-ID: <20230101014054.GD5825@mcvoy.com> References: <335F89A9-30C2-41A2-8E84-C2D761746634@planet.nl> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Message-ID-Hash: VJVBLSYMB7VTOYHCZRSJUSX3GR5XBG3Q X-Message-ID-Hash: VJVBLSYMB7VTOYHCZRSJUSX3GR5XBG3Q X-MailFrom: lm@mcvoy.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: 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