The C stands for Cthulhu
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
"C Is Not a Low-level Language:
Your computer is not a fast PDP-11"
@natecull Makes you nostalgic for old MIPS chips, doesn't it?
<< Some dead code has now been transformed into undefined behavior.>>
Lots of movies about that scenario now.
@natecull Is there a MIPSy Pi-type board?
@natecull that's basically the plot of westworld
*rumbling narrator voice-over:* Show more
@natecull I wonder how many MIPS cores we could fit on, say, an i7 die, and how fast they could be driven in cycle times? I bet 64 separately threadable cores, 20GHz, 64 bit MIPS.
@natecull I don’t pretend to wholly grok this essay, but did find it interesting.
> This adds a significant amount of complexity (and power consumption) to allow programmers to write mostly sequential code.
How much power, globally, is wasted in this way? Thanks.
@natecull Oh and while we're at it let's not really bother exposing the parallel machine properly so there's practical migration path where new stuff is written for it directly but you can still use stuff that thinks bell-bottoms are fashionable if you have to.
"Hey let's make a parallel hardware machine and then expose its parallelism as insanely complicated compiler transformations of a 1970-era serial machine and THEN on top of THAT fake serial machine, build parallel systems that have to implement THEIR parallelism through insanely complicated compiler transforms down to that fake serial machine."
"Ok, but ALSO, let's take all those parallel hardware machines and gigabytes of operating system stack and implement THOSE as completely fake machines!"