[rescue] Sun 3/60

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, August 16, 2001 at 00:33:49 (-0400), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Sun 3/60
>
>   And there's one way NO PC will ever run rings around a Sun3/60:
> Reliability.  Some of those machines regularly had uptimes near 600
> days.  And they were in constant use.

Hah!  Piddlywinks!  If I'd have had a UPS and some air conditioning in
my office back then I'm sure I could have made it to 900 days with no
sweat.

As it was my 3/60 apparently bit the bucket after its third summer in my
+90-degree office....  :-(  [I've not really tried to do anything with
it to see what's burned out -- it's still sitting out in my garage.]

>   And I don't know anyone who's actually used the SunOS4 C compiler to
> do anything but bootstrap GCC.  Especially on a 68K, where GCC's
> optimizer kicks ass.

Ah, no, that's not true at all.  I *ONLY* used Sun's m68k compiler and
*never* used GCC for production code, and for very well researched and
justified reasons too.  (and I built several small ISPs with all the
bells and whistles on purely sun-3 equipment!)

SunOS-4's compiler always generated smaller code, and usually faster
code too, not to mention being much faster at generating that code....
(GCC's bloat could cause even the most well endowed sun3 to swap in some
circumstances!)  I don't think I ever ran into any compiler bugs with
SunOS-4's m68k compiler either, but I can't say the same about GCC.

I even specifically held off running NetBSD on my sun3's because of
GCC's brain damage.  I.e. that's up to, and including, GCC 2.7.2.

Somewhere I even have the benchmark results and disassembled code to
prove it, but I've no idea where they were buried during my last move --
pobably also out in the garage in an unlabeled box! :-).

(of course where GCC really started to loose ground is on sparc v8 and
alpha -- only with GCC-3.x is performance supposedly coming back up to
par with commercial compilers.  It really sucked on the 3B2 too, at
least after the SysVr3.2 compiler came out with its enhanced optimiser.)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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