[TUHS] Re: A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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typo: s/My complaining/Much complaining/
sigh.. dyslex-r-me
ᐧ

On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 4:47 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
> Bring this back to TUHS relevance...
>
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 2:43 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
>> The one caveat here is that people must understand the warning and that
>> any change makes things better. There is nothing worse than just tossing a
>> cast in to brute force it, only to later discover it's the wrong cast or
>> you needed a different semantic change.
>>
> Most certainly --   It's why I >>loved<< Gimpel's flex-e-lint product and
> as Paul pointed out, Judy Ward's messages from the DEC Gem compiler - both
> were the two best I ever ran into in giving you real information about what
> was happening.
>
> I also tell a story from my DEC time.   After the GEM compiler was
> released and before most other vendors were 64-bits, the ISVs were first
> starting to do their ports to Alpha.   My complaining ensued. We would discover
> from numerous ISVs that after the Alpha port was complete, their bug count
> dropped - why because the ISV's code has been kinda nasty and the older
> compilers had been silent about it they had assumed the ILP32 model.
> Alphas, using LP64, could not be.  Judy would find things and say -- what
> a minute -- you want me to do what with that and issued a fairly detailed
> warning (which was the key - she explained what the issue was).  Often
> the 32 to 64-bit nature forced the programmers at the ISV's to rethink
> how there were actually declaring things to make the code clearer,
> simpler, better, *etc*.   The classic rewrite never happens unless you
> are forced too.
>
> I remember going to a Supercomputer conference and talking with the
> developers at one the ISVs who I will not name.  He thanks me.  He said his
> team has been arguing with their management for years to redo the UNIX
> support library. The Tru64 port was what finally allowed them to do it.
> But it took 9 months which pissed off his boss. But when it was completed,
> and pass all the tests on the Alpha, it just recompiled on Solaris, AIX,
> and HP-UX - which had never happened before. He could not believe what a
> great compiler we had.
>
> I've always said the Alpha was the greatest gift to Sun and Intel in the
> commercial SW world because it forced the ISV to clean up their act before
> they ever saw those processors and Sun/Intel ports were piece of cake.   It
> was not that porting to Alpha was difficult -- it was cleaning up your own
> mess.
>
> Remember we had already gone through this in the PDP-11 ILP16 to Vax
> ILP32  transition but it is funny how history repeated itself.
> ᐧ
>

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