Advanced reading

Advanced reading

Posted Feb 21, 2008 21:26 UTC (Thu) by valhenson (subscriber, #38407)
Parent article: KHB: Synthesis: An Efficient Implementation of Fundamental Operating Systems Services

For people who want to get into detailed analysis of the applicability of the ideas in Synthesis, a good place to start is Section 7.5, "Objections." It's organized around the following questions:

• "How much of the performance improvement is due to my ideas, and how much is due to writing in assembler, and tuning the hell out of the thing?"
• "Self-modifying data structures are troublesome on pipelined machines, and code generation has problems with machines that don't allow finegrained control of the instruction cache. In other words, Synthesis techniques are dependent on hardware features that aren't present in all machines, and, worse, are becoming increasingly scarce."
• "Does this matter? Hardware is getting faster, and anything that is slow today will probably be fast enough in two years." [*snicker* - Ed.]
• "Why is Synthesis written in assembler? How much of the reason is that you wanted no extraneous instructions? How much of the reason is that code synthesis requires assembler? How much of Synthesis could be re-written in a high-level language?"

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