What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

http://danluu.com/butler-lampson-1999/

by not_a_boat • 2 years ago

159 147 2 years ago

devjab• 2 years ago

The phone networks and basic infrastructure for the internet in many countries wouldn’t work without Erlang. Which is functional… but maybe that doesn’t count?

caditinpiscinam2• 2 years ago

On the other hand, the banking infrastructure in many countries wouldn't work without COBOL, scientific research wouldn't work without MATLAB, and healthcare wouldn't work without MUMPS. Many languages and paradigms, good and bad, end up entrenched within an industry.

jnxx3• 2 years ago

COBOL
MATLAB
MUMPS

One of each uglier than the one before. But:

Is there something we can learn from these examples? Are there good reasons for these languages being adopted? And are the Racket designers with their approach of "a language to define interoperable DSLs" up to something?

simne11• 2 years ago

You forget FORTRAN (was very popular for scientific computing, and nearest neighbor with COBOL in S/360 environment) :)))

blt• 2 years ago

The link to "Microsoft's driver verification tool", which "has probably had more impact than all formal chip design tools combined", is broken. Does anyone know which tool this meant?

nequo• 2 years ago

That link is archived here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160416132849/http://research.m...

eimrine• 2 years ago

The document is still searchable: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

skybrian3• 2 years ago

Fancy type systems have come a long way since then. (TypeScript, for example.)

pyuser5832• 2 years ago

TS really stands out as amazing. It’s realized a lot of the promise of strong typing.

malcolmgreaves• 2 years ago

I agree that TypeScript is quite amazing. And that it's indeed improved the programs created that run in the browser or on `node`.

However, I wanted to point out something that I think often gets overlooked when folks talk about TypeScript. I'd argue that TS has realized it for the web programming masses, who usually don't have any computer science education and thus are unaware of computing fundamentals such as types. TS hasn't realized the promise of strong typing only because it has been quite late to the game, so to speak.

I do think I understand where you're coming from. Web programmers are the largest group of programming-related professionals. Bringing CS wins to this large group absolutely does bring the largest gains and impact to industry.

There have been many programming languages created decades before TypeScript that have realized the promise of strong typing. Unfortunately, I think this road took too long. Collectively, people have known about these ideas since John Backus's 1977 Turing Award Lecture [1] -- "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs"

Anyways, I digress. Hopefully this was insightful! Have a great day :)

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/359576.359579

cgh• 2 years ago

How so? It looks a lot like a less-rich Java, whose type system has existed for literally decades. In fact, the generics syntax and type erasure was directly influenced by Java.

ildjarn10• 2 years ago

TS has a powerful type system that behaves in strange and counter intuitive ways, particular for people coming from JS. It doesn’t even have a spec, really. I would prefer something less powerful but more predictable, personally.

ipython• 2 years ago

Fascinating about how ARM has made tremendous strides in the “high end” market since 2015. I would argue that I would categorize RISC as a “yes” with its absolute dominance on mobile and now moving into data center not to mention all the embedded use cases.

t435622• 2 years ago

I think the battle between RISC and CISC is overshadowed by the battle between non-x86 and x86. On average are new designs more RISC than CISC? I don't know but that's different from numbers of chips of a certain type sold.

RISC showed what you could do with a clean sheet and the battle has really been about whether we can afford the cost of changing to a new instruction set just because it's better by a bit.

zer00eyz• 2 years ago

> by the battle between non-x86 and x86.

68000 -> PowerPC -> x86 -> arm

Apple has been through 4 architectures in 30 years. Given enough money and tyranny (as in "were doing this" kind of leadership, vs committee) its apparently not that terrible.

bdw5204• 2 years ago

At the moment, x86 is mainly hanging on in legacy spaces because of backward compatibility. Everything new is RISC including Apple's newer Macs. Windows computers still run on x86 because people buy Windows to run legacy code. Playstation and Xbox run on x86 because that makes porting games from Windows more convenient.

My view, even when I was studying RISC V in grad school around 6 years ago, was that RISC is clearly superior technically and this would only become more obvious with Moore's Law dying. I think subsequent events are only confirming this view. The strongest evidence for it is that nobody would even think about making a new CISC architecture that isn't x86.

bluescrn• 2 years ago

At the moment, x86 is mainly hanging on in legacy spaces because of backward compatibility.

x86 platforms also tend to let you run your own code, and are associated with 'proper computers/proper operating systems' where you have full access to your own device.

The vast majority of non-x86 devices are of the 'locked down and dumbed-down' variety. Content consumption devices built around monopolistic App Stores and touch-centric UIs. They tend to be entirely non-upgradable and, increasingly, actively repair-resistant, too.

The market for a 'real computer' may be shrinking, but it's premature to call them 'legacy devices'.

(It'd be nice if serious ARM-based PCs became more of an option though, not just little devices like the Pi, or glued-in-battery Apple products, but fully-upgradeable replacements for a high-end x86 workstation or gaming PC)

fourfour3• 2 years ago

Playstation and Xbox run on x86 because that makes porting games from Windows more convenient.

I expect it helps a lot that AMD can easily provide competitive x86 and GPU cores in one SoC, as they’re already building similar APUs - just with smaller graphics segments?

wmf2• 2 years ago

I still have to agree with Dan. "If there's any threat to x86, it's ARM, and it's their business model that's a threat, not their ISA."

titzer2• 2 years ago

I would have believed this before the M1, but now I think fixed-width instructions are great for parallel decode, so there's a real threat now which is attributable to RISC.

sampo2• 2 years ago

Fancy type systems

We are taking steps to this direction. By adding optional typing to dynamic languages Python and JavaScript/TypeScript. And then type checker tools and local programming style guides are making using these maybe less optional, and more mandatory.

t435622• 2 years ago

IMO the day python types become mandatory there will be a fork.

It would be such a total betrayal of it's reason for existing that we would have to invent another untyped or duck-typed language again.

sampo2• 2 years ago

I mean, your company or your project may require you to write type hints and use a type checker tool. Not that Python the language makes typing mandatory.

chasd00• 2 years ago

nagware like Typescript have turned type bolt-ons into a religion almost. It has its place but really gets in the way in others. Hence, the reason untyped languages exist in the first place.

kfajdsl• 2 years ago

For me the primary purpose of TypeScript is to give my editor information about interfaces so I don’t have to do the menial back and forth of accidentally making a typo in a function name, object param, etc.

I find myself using less type hints in Python because the story for REPL driven development is so much better than JavaScript, and that takes most of the pain away.

morningsam• 2 years ago

I find that even when type hints are made "mandatory" using Mypy's strict mode, having a dynamically typed language underneath that allows you to cheat using Any or cast() where necessary makes writing Python feel much less cumbersome than writing in actual statically typed languages.

Presumably, a Python with "mandatory" type hints would still allow you to cheat in those same ways.

slaymaker1907• 2 years ago

Sum types have definitely been making a big splash. I'd also look at how C++ has added concepts and Go has added generics. Local type inference is also commonplace too, even Java has it.

peterfirefly6• 2 years ago

Even C23 has it.

acchow2• 2 years ago

Those would be considered basic type systems. For "fancy", you gotta dive deeper into the lambda cube (tho generics I guess in 1999 would be fancy and one step in).

Ar-Curunir• 2 years ago

The borrow-checker is pretty fancy.

keybored3• 2 years ago

The author thinks that Formal Methods are a Maybe because chipmakers while Fancy type systems are a No. I think the bar is pretty high for Type systems (in the mind of the author).

aleign2• 2 years ago

What is "capabilities" supposed to mean?

jayd162• 2 years ago

Probably Capability based security

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

aleign2• 2 years ago

Thank you :)

narrator• 2 years ago

Funny how in the 90s security was an enterprise feature and now better security and cryptography than we had in the 90s is on every $15 android phone.

jnxx3• 2 years ago

What is "capabilities" supposed to mean?

"Is this app allowed to read your contacts?"

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

It means that the permission (capability) to do something is encapsulated into an unforgeable bearer instrument that can be stored, passed around and so on. An open file handle (descriptor on UNIX) is a capability, because if you have it you can use it to read and maybe write to the file, and because you can send it to another process, at which point that process also has the capability to read and write that file.

Capabilities are one of those concepts that's a bit like FP or RISC. It sounds elegant but in the real world experience is mixed, so it's rare for a system to rely on it purely. Most real security systems today are built on semi-static permissions granted to domains defined by some third party identity system. Capabilities do get used, but mostly in the sandbox context and mostly as a detail.

So I think Dan is not quite correct that mobile platforms use capabilities. Users assign permissions to specific apps semi-statically there. The lowest levels of the OS may use a small set of capabilities as part of the implementation, but granted permissions are not generally easy to send around to other apps.

stevefan19992• 2 years ago

I would like to suggest that the classical taxonomy of RISC/CISC dichotomy is basically non-existent nowadays -- namely because both sides have influenced each other. It is well known that CISC has taken a lot of inspirations from RISC designs (such as having a lot more registers in x64), and RISC designs also taken some inspirations from CISC (such as having SIMD/vectorization units). In other words, the line between RISC and CISC has been very fine lately.

Also, at the end of the day, they all turned into μops. If I remember Jim Keller correctly, ARM and x86, they are basically the same in the back nowadays, its just the frontend and their decoding units are different. And that's why he strongly suggested AMD to also adapt Zen design with ARM ISA during his tenure there, oh I think it is called K12.

I think there is another blurry line between superscalar and VLIW architecture, too.

abainbridge3• 2 years ago

Yep. RISC was interesting when gate budgets for CPU pipelines were seriously limited. It was interesting because before RISC the industry had been merrily spending the gate budget increase on adding lots of use-specific instructions. The RISC people pointed out that if you removed support for all the fancy instructions you had enough gate budget for the ALU to be nicely pipelined, and then you could wind up the clock rate greatly and this was worth much more than the fancy instructions.

For decades now we've had enough gate budget to have nicely pipelined designs with complex instruction sets, so that's what everyone does. RISC solves a problem that no longer exists.

thesz6• 2 years ago

You are not quite right about pipelined design being faster. At least, not without substantial effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R2000_microprocessor

"The R2000 is a 32-bit microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA)..."

"The R2000 was available in 8.3, 12.5 and 15 MHz grades..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I386

"The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985..."

"Max. CPU clock rate: 12.5 MHz to 40 MHz"

As you can see, 80386 was released a year earlier than R2000 and was about 1.5 times faster than MIPS implementation from the start.

The critical path is, usually, in addition/subtraction, which should be complete in one cycle in both 80386 and in R2000. To pipeline addition you need a superpipelined CPU, one that has several stages for computation. Even seemingly simple computation of condition codes can make clock cycle 10% longer (SPARC vs MIPS) if your CPU is just simply pipelined.

BTW, some Pentiums did computed 32-bit addition in two cycles, all in name of higher clock frequencies.

bananabiscuit• 2 years ago

Is there something about RISC that is still makes it better than CISC when it comes to per-watt performance? Seems like nobody has any success making an x86 processor that's as power efficient as ARM or RISC.

CalChris• 2 years ago

A 20,000 gate minimal RISC-V RV32E controller CPU isn't going to use μops. In 2024, RISC-V has turned that 2015 No into an unqualified Yes even if the microarchitecture of more complex OOO RISC-V systems resemble the microarchitectures of similarly complex x86 and ARM CPUs.

wmf2• 2 years ago

To the extent that RISC-V is successful it's due to openness/freeness; RISC has nothing to do with it. An open "CISC-V" community would have been just as successful (and people wouldn't gripe about instruction fusion).

pclmulqdq2• 2 years ago

I have made a few of those RISC-V CPUs. The minute the "M" instruction set shows up (with division), a macro/micro-op split becomes worth it if you want to minimize gate count or maximize speed.

titzer2• 2 years ago

I agree that the line is pretty thin, but would draw it as: fixed-width versus variable-width. I think the M? line of Apple CPUs, with extremely-wide parallel decode, has been a game changer. The performance per watt is really off the charts. That's partly due to integrated RAM and all, but mostly due to microarchitectural changes, which I believe to be a massive step function in superscalar bandwidth (wider decode, huge ROB, huge numbers of ports). It seems like the power-hungry decode stage has been tamed, and I think this is because of fixed-width instructions in arm.

jcranmer• 2 years ago

RISC/CISC is near the top of the list of "things emphasized in education that bear little relevance in practice". RISC isn't so much a single coherent design idea as a collection of ideas, some of which have won out (more register files), and some of which haven't (avoid instructions that take multiple clock cycles). The architectures from the days the "debate" was more relevant that have had the most success are the ones which most thoroughly blurred the lines between classical RISC and CISC--namely, Arm and x86.

I think there is another blurry line between superscalar and VLIW architecture, too.

No, the line is pretty damn sharp. The core idea behind VLIW is that having hardware doing dynamic scheduling (as superscalar does) is silly and the compiler should be responsible for statically scheduling all instructions. The only blur here is that both VLIW and superscalar envision having multiple execution units that can be simultaneously scheduled with work, but who is responsible for doing that scheduling is pretty distinct.

stevefan19992• 2 years ago

Okay, I will have to review the lecture about VLIW, again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHsYp7ZkHQ

gumby• 2 years ago

RISC designs also taken some inspirations from CISC (such as having SIMD/vectorization units)

I think that one went the other way: for example the PlayStation 2 used a MIPS chip with 256-bit SIMD instructions (the TMPR 5900) as well as a dedicated GPU (the so-called “emotion engine”)

simne11• 2 years ago

classical taxonomy of RISC/CISC dichotomy is basically non-existent nowadays

After digest information about IBM 360, I decided, we lost CISCs. One of most important feature of 360 was customizable microcode, which you could load on system boot and got effectively different hardware (like with FPGA emulators of Amiga's). It was widely used to emulate old hardware, like IBM 1401 or IBM 7xxx series. But I have not seen this feature in 390 documentation, so looks like their 360 emulation become just software (and with achievements of semiconductors in 1990s it looks like adequate, to switch to software emulation).

I must admit, ARM marketed feature of customized microcode, to add new instructions (they have standardized place in instruction set, named "custom coprocessor instructions", so if you have enough money, you could make special ARM with your additional instructions), but it is nothing if compare to 360.

simne11• 2 years ago

Did you know for what purposes (targets) made mini-computers and why they was limited?

When computers first appeared, they was big, just because technology limitations made small machines very expensive to use, so scale used to make computations cheaper.

In early 1970s, technology advanced to stage, where become possible to make simplified versions of big computers for some limited tasks, still too expensive for wide use.

Simple illustration, IBM-3033 mainframe with 16MBytes RAM could serve 17500 3270 terminals, and PDP of same time could about few tens (may be 50, I don't know exactly), so mainframes even when was very expensive, but given good cost per workplace.

Known example, PDP used to control one of scientific nuclear reactor. PDP chosen, not because it have best mips/price ratio, but because it was cheapest adequate machine for this task, so is affordable for limited budget.

Very long time, mini machines stay in niche of limited machines, used to avoid much more expensive full-scale mainframes. They used to control industrial automation (CNC), chemical factories and other small things.

Once appeared microcomputers (CPU on one chip), first known on wide market in 1977, they begin eat mini's space from bottom, when mainframes continue to become more cost effective (more terminals with appearance of cheap modems, etc) and eat mini's space from top.

And in 1990s, when appeared affordable 32-bit microprocessors and became affordable Megabytes of RAM, mini's disappear, because their place was captured by micro's.

To be honest, I just don't know anything we could not name microcomputer now, as even IBM Z mainframes are now have single-chip processor and largest supercomputers are practically clouds of SOCs (NUMA architecture).

And I must admit, I still see PDP's (or VAX's) on enterprises, where they still control old machines from 1990s (they are very reliable even when limited from modern view, but still work).

As I remember, last symmetrical multiprocessor supercomputer was Cray Y-MP, later machines become ccNUMA or just NUMA or even cloud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINPACK

Unix was simplified version of Multics, system considered to run on mainframes (BTW even exists officially certified Posix Unix for mainframes).

You could try mainframes software yourself, it is very affordable now with emulator (sure, be careful about license):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)

And you will see yourself, how many things borrowed by modern OS's from mainframes.

This is nature, people choose simpler, cheaper thing (yes, I don't like x86, my love is 68k).

Apofis• 2 years ago

With all of the sanctions China is really starting to push RISC forward, challenge ARM, and they are starting to find success. That "No" has absolutely changed to a "Maybe".

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-and-china-au...

fulafel• 2 years ago

I don't know if a reduced instruction set can "take inspiration" from a big one, it just becomes a non reduced one.

Also these examples don't feel right for me: x64 has the same number of registers as CISCs traditionally did (eg m68k, z/architecture, vax). 32-bit x86 was just an exceptionally register-starved CISC. And SIMD postdates RISC vs CISC divide for a long time, both schools of architecture got SIMD around the same time.

But the divide has become less relevant because originally instruction set affected chip area a lot, and there were big gains to be had by the quantitative approach of benchmarking compiled apps with different proposed instruction sets and seeing what runs fastest when transistors are spent on hot instructions vs execution engine resources. Nowadays we have more transistors than we know what to do with, and just put in lots of cores that end up sitting idle because of diminishing returns trying to speed up cores with more transistors.

hosh• 2 years ago

Do GPUs and TPUs for AI count towards parallelism?

sophacles• 2 years ago

I don't think so, they still tend to fall into the "Lampson further remarks that to do parallel programming, what you need to do is put all your parallelism into a little box and then have a wizard go write the code in that box." statment, for the most part.

jnxx3• 2 years ago

What could be a different case is Clojure. But I am not sure, and the performance characteristics of Clojure make it well-suited for server-style concurrency, but not so much for high-performance parallelism.

silvestrov• 2 years ago

I'd say that "pure Functional programming" has become a no.

But "Functional programming approach" has been subsumed into existing programming languages, e.g. records in Java. You get most of the benefit of FP while keeping all of the other good stuf from an imperative language.

unregistereddev• 2 years ago

I'd agree with this and add that pattern matching and functional interfaces are additional examples of tools from the FP toolbox being subsumed into existing programming languages.

Pure functional programming seems tempting. In small projects it can produce beautiful, readable code. In large projects I've only seen it result in messes, and I still haven't decided whether that's due to limitations of functional purity, due to the team (and myself) misusing features that we don't understand, or both.

ildjarn10• 2 years ago

What mainstream languages have a good suite of FP features though?

If you try to write mostly pure code in Java I’m afraid you’re in for a bad time, despite the (big!) improvements of records and lambdas.

Minimum viable FP starts at OCaml, F#, Scala and Closure, yet none of these are mainstream.

AS37• 2 years ago

I code in C# and use a ton of LINQ when writing business logic. It's FP-ish enough to avoid logic mistakes. The mediator design pattern, which is kind of bringing another FP paradigm to the OO world, also features heavily.

anon2913• 2 years ago

Hold on... Purity and functional programming are different things. Functional programs can be pure but not necessarily.

Functional programming means functions are first class citizens and can be constructed on the fly. Modern python, c++, rust, even java now do this.

Purity is a nice to have (and arguably rusts borrow system enforces a kind of purity).

paulddraper• 2 years ago

Java streams.

java.time

Valhalla even

macintux2• 2 years ago

Hybrid languages are sub-optimal in a lot of ways. One of the joys of functional programming are the guarantees that imperative languages can't offer (primarily immutability).

jprival• 2 years ago

“Functional style” doesn’t offer the same guarantees, sure, but I wouldn’t underestimate the structural and readability benefits it can offer for certain kinds of tasks.

Terr_• 2 years ago

The moment you have any database or filesystem or remote-service, the hybridization starts anyway.

Sure, technically a single computer's local RAM is being managed with strict guidelines, but that correlates less and less to overall application state and behavior these days.

dehrmann2• 2 years ago

Hybrid languages are sub-optimal in a lot of ways.

The real world is messy and stateful.

tubthumper84• 2 years ago

Definitely agree that mainstream languages are adopting functional features, but records aren't a functional feature.

Records are basic data modeling and something that has been around since the beginning of programming languages, whether procedural or functional. It's one of the bare minimums of having a type system, and Java didn't have this due to the misguided belief that "everything is an object". I think records being added is more of a symptom of that belief weakening.

There are functional features that have made it over to Java which are the things related to functions, i.e. lambdas and such which are a welcome addition.

gardenhedge2• 2 years ago

Java records are object-oriented construct

mrkeen• 2 years ago

e.g. records in Java

Aren't these just C structs?

You get most of the benefit of FP

FP = Functions. Same output for the same input. No capability to interfere with (or to be interfered with) other functions.

raydev• 2 years ago

Aren't these just C structs?

Are C structs guaranteed to be immutable at compile-time?

sys_64738• 2 years ago

Formal Methods was for people who didn't want to write any code.

jayd162• 2 years ago

I guess from some sense, all web apps and all GUI apps using the GPU are using parallelism. That's almost everything. Those are both leveraging shared-nothing type architectures so you can think in a single thread and apply it to concurrent work loads for parallelism.

Does that not count? What would satisfy this category?

dehrmann2• 2 years ago

I think the dream of parallelism in 1999 was that CPUs aren't going to get much faster in terms of clock cycles, so how will algorithms run on more data. This is a bit dumbed-down, but things like sorting in parallel.

It turns out that local data didn't quite scale like that, we got more ram and SSDs, and that coordination usually makes small-scale parallel algorithms prohibitively expensive. Where parallelism does work today is some flavor of SIMD like vector instructions, parallel matrix multiplication on a GPU, or map-reduce.

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

Interesting how much has changed since 2015. Apple's M chips have made RISC is a clear yes now. Rust has a pretty fancy type system. Not Haskell-fancy but still. Functional programming is pretty much an expected feature now.

aleph_minus_one• 2 years ago

Apple's M chips have made RISC is a clear yes now.

ARM is not a pure RISC architecture (even though its instruction set is somewhat inspired by those ideas behind RISC that stood the test of time).

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

What counts as "pure RISC"?

keybored3• 2 years ago

What can you do in Haskell that you can’t do in Rust with macros and elbow grease?

Legend2440• 2 years ago

Neural networks:

1999 - No

2015 - Not really

2024 - Yes?

Calavar• 2 years ago

I'd say 2005 to 2010 is probably more probably more appropriate for not really. By 2015, neural networks were already a really hot research topic. Just off the top of my head, the seq2seq paper was published in 2014 and U-Net and ResNet were published in 2015.

ska2• 2 years ago

This is eliding most of the history of neural networks as a hot reasearch topics. Since the late 50's early 1960s they've had several resurgences in interest, e.g. 80s RNNs, 90s stuff around several centers. Hell people were doing interesting things with them commercially in the 90's. The late 90s and early 00's had a lot of other interest (kernel methods, SVMs) but NN folks kept plugging, and the hardware to hit the next level was just around the corner.

The resurgence you're noting are papers with a 10 year tail before them (hell, most of the deep concepts were initiated decades before but lacked both the data sources and efficient hardware to really work them out).

This stuff has a long and deeply connected history.

Divver• 2 years ago

I wish this was updated for 2024

His RISC being “No” most would agree is somewhat incorrect though it seemed correct back in 2015.

But it kinda goes to show how these yes/maybe/no things can evolve unexpectedly over time and not be to taken as gospel that will stand the test of time.

tptacek• 2 years ago

Good 'jcranmer on the RISC-CISC thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39481940

vanderZwan• 2 years ago

I just want people to start doing interesting things with stack machines again. Like, hardware ones, not VMs (plenty of interesting stuff happening there). But that's the concatenative language lover in me wanting to see more interesting things happen, not some zealot claiming we all should switch to it.

keybored3• 2 years ago

    Yes                      Maybe
    Firefox Reader Mode      CSS

MattGrommes• 2 years ago

Also, Reading Mode in the sidebar of Chrome.

The days of square monitors and wall-to-wall text have been over for a while.

oconnor663• 2 years ago

Lampson further remarks that to do parallel programming, what you need to do is put all your parallelism into a little box and then have a wizard go write the code in that box. Not much has changed since 2009.

I would like to see a reevaluation of this take with respect to Rust. When we're talking about Rust's safety features, we usually focus on memory safety, because that has the biggest impact on security. But there are lots of memory safe languages, and I think it's actually Rust's thread safety features that are the most unique. (Lots of shared type system machinery between both sets of features.)

simne11• 2 years ago

That Intel ceded the low end of the market might seem ironic considering Intel's origins, but they've always been aggressive about moving upmarket

Will see. Intel after 2023 is not like before 2023, when it lost its dominance to AMD and partially to Nvidia and ARM (Apple-M2).

Now lowest end CPUs become RISC-V and ARM pushing to become one of leaders.

x86 is strong, but who knows, how long it could dominate under pressure.

And if we count not desktops but all personal devices, ARM is already won (on just smartphones, now more ARM CPUs than people on Earth, and Data Centers share of ARM CPUs growing).

Only one final thing I could copypaste from "X-files" - "truth is out of there".

simne11• 2 years ago

This was not only feature of 360th, for example Xerox Alto, also have documented feature to alter microcode when need (as I hear, they have special framework to work with it, just like we now work with Assembler when need), and I hear rumors that something similar was shipped with DEC mini-computers, but for micro-computers, this feature practically disappeared.

Even when we have "microcode update" feature in many modern CPUs, but it is usually undocumented feature, to which nobody have access outside CPU manufacturers (only could upload encrypted binary, supplied by manufacturer to fix bugs). As I said, in 360th, this was documented standard feature, you could use if need.

And I could tell from FPGA cooking, not all things implemented in FPGAs as hardware logic pipelines. When speed accepting, many people using in FPGA practically microcode engines (very common thing is 1-bit CPU, which is very similar to CISC microcode engine, and programmed in Assembler, very similar to early 8-bits; some people prefer full-featured CPU, like 8048 or even more).

dang• 2 years ago

What's worked in Computer Science (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15796515 - Nov 2017 (62 comments)

What's Worked in Computer Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623600 - Nov 2015 (63 comments)

xorvoid• 2 years ago

Fancy Type Systems is indeed vague, but I’d disagree with No in 2024. They are slowly winning. Definitely a Maybe to a Yes. E.g. Rust is hugely popular/successful and has brought a much more sophisticated type system to system programming.

Byamarro• 2 years ago

"Fancy type systems" What about TypeScript? I've literally implemented snake game using types alone, it's quite powerful.

What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

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