[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, April 17, 2002 at 10:25:13 (+0100), David Cantrell wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 12:39:20PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> You know as well as I do that vendors' claims and vendor support are not
> worth much.  And whilst NetBSD may *run* on those platforms, that doesn't
> mean that it is running optimally - and AFAIC, sub-optimal == bad.

Ah ha!  I was wondering when someone might claim that....  :-)

Sub-optimal might be bad in some contexts, but very rarely so in the
case of the quality of compiler generated object code for most
unix-based applications, even on slower older machines.  Sure my X11
workstation might be a bit faster if I re-compiled all the software on
it with the Sun SPARC compiler, but there's still a fundamental limit to
how fast a 25MHz SS-1+ can move bits around on even a 1-bit deep display!

You know what Knuth says about optimisation......  (and if you don't
you'd better go read up on it right quick now!  ;-)

>  But then, as I said earlier, you don't choose NetBSD for performance.

I have avoided NetBSD in some situations because of performance issues
that it exhibited even when running vendor-compiled binaries.  But then
again those were not compiler-related, or even CPU related, issues.
Only in -current, with the unified buffer cache, is NetBSD finally
re-approaching proprietary UNIX performance again on the same hardware.....

Not being a crypto guy, and not doing much scientific visualisation or
3D graphics rendering, or multi-media anything except MP3 audio playing,
which is not very compute intensive actually, and especially not video
game playing, about the only really compute-intensive work I do
day-to-day with computers, other than maybe compiling C++ code and
running interpreters like Smalltalk and occasionally the Java virtual
machine, is to run rc5des and setiathome. :-)

(well I suppose running SSH v2 for the purpose of securely copying files
to and from an SS-1 is a bit "compute intensive" in context with what's
possible on that processor :-)

> You seem to think "bad code" == "bad source code".  When I used the phrase,
> I meant "bad (ie sub-optimal) object code".

I most certainly understood what you meant -- you just didn't understand
what I wrote in reply!  ;-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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