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amen zwa, esq.@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz

I am an ordinary man, so I am unique up to isomorphism.
I am on MathsTodon not to preach to the choir, but to attend the concert.
I admire well constructed arguments, but I am not argumentative.
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Joined: 2026-08-30 05:05:45
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Reply to @koakuma@uwu.social
amen zwa, esq.@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz (2026-08-30 05:57:18)
Indeed. A new architecture is an x86 clone (AMD), an x86 pretender (Transmeta), or soon-to-be dead unique one. It’s a bit disheartening.

@koakuma

amen zwa, esq.@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz (2026-06-22 11:42:06)
This article, "C Is Not a Low-Level Language; Your Computer is Not A Fast PDP-11", by David Chisnall of Cambridge, is a critical self-assessment of C, modern CPU architectures that pander to C, and modern C compiler writers, like himself.

The intertwined successes of UNIX and C was inevitable, given the nature of the computing technology in the late 1960s. But that instant, meteoric success continues to demand backward compatibility through the decades, and that backward compatibility engenders much forward restraint on future advances.

As a long-time fan of C and PDP-11/70, I find Chisnall's critiques painfully true. The same could be said of UNIX, my all-time favourite operating system. And x86, too, followed a similar path to immediate success and perpetual dominance.

The power of inertia is terrifying: even after 50 years, the current score of the computer architecture and programming language game remains "von Neumann 1 v Backus 0".

https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3212477.3212479