Many years ago I was called on a Friday lunchtime by a very scared IT manager.
The computer that was running their organisation had been struck by lightning. They offered me a lot of money to get the system up and running by monday 09.00.
Naturally I accepted the challenge and made my way to the site, it was unbelievable. The lightning hadn't actual struck the computer, it had hit a power line 100 yards away, but the damage was incredible.
I thought he was joking when he said it had melted.
Well over the course of the weekend I managed to either build, repair, or source replacements for everything except the memory. It was now about 03.00 monday and I hadn't slept, eaten, or had a beer since about 12.00 Friday.
Fed up by now I hacked up a little serial interface and connected it to one of the tape drives that had survived the blast, man those things were tough, then created a little board on vero that took a memory address and serialised it. This was hacked into the system and I punched in the boot code.
10 minutes later, a monitor sprang to life.
Well when I say sprang, it more like oozed to life.
One character per second, you had to hold a key down until it appeared on screen then release it, but it was working.
Amazingly all their records had survived as well! ( found out later that all the tape drives were run off a seperate mains feed with a surge supressor, at least one engineer must have known what he was doing.)
They paid me off and ran like that for two days before they could get a replacement ram board.
I have used many compilers, on many platforms, and not one of them has ever generated code that is ALWAYS better than what I could hand code in assembler.
Compilers are large, complicated pieces of software that do a damn good job. So what if you could make some parts of your code run better on this processor or that, do you want to have to sit down and code routines for every processor?
In the bad old days we had to do this, we didn't have compilers, we coded in assembler. That's why it took months to port code from one device to another. A friend of mine has just ported two full EA games in 30 hours. Can you imagine how long it would have taken had you to port it from Z80 to 6502?
Far more problematic is porting from one language to another, but that's another whole can of worms.
You have a straight choice, write production quality code in your prefered language and live with any minor performance issues, or write software for a processor and live with the fact that you will probably have to code the lot again in the future.
Having said that there is one alternative, use Elate, then you have binary portability and you shouldn't have to compile the damn thing every again.
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Many years ago I was called on a Friday lunchtime by a very scared IT manager.
The computer that was running their organisation had been struck by lightning.
They offered me a lot of money to get the system up and running by monday 09.00.
Naturally I accepted the challenge and made my way to the site, it was unbelievable.
The lightning hadn't actual struck the computer, it had hit a power line 100 yards away, but the damage was incredible.
I thought he was joking when he said it had melted.
Well over the course of the weekend I managed to either build, repair, or source replacements for everything except the memory. It was now about 03.00 monday and I hadn't slept, eaten, or had a beer since about 12.00 Friday.
Fed up by now I hacked up a little serial interface and connected it to one of the tape drives that had survived the blast, man those things were tough, then created a little board on vero that took a memory address and serialised it. This was hacked into the system and I punched in the boot code.
10 minutes later, a monitor sprang to life.
Well when I say sprang, it more like oozed to life.
One character per second, you had to hold a key down until it appeared on screen then release it, but it was working.
Amazingly all their records had survived as well! ( found out later that all the tape drives were run off a seperate mains feed with a surge supressor, at least one engineer must have known what he was doing.)
They paid me off and ran like that for two days before they could get a replacement ram board.
I have used many compilers, on many platforms, and not one of them has ever generated code that is ALWAYS better than what I could hand code in assembler. Compilers are large, complicated pieces of software that do a damn good job. So what if you could make some parts of your code run better on this processor or that, do you want to have to sit down and code routines for every processor? In the bad old days we had to do this, we didn't have compilers, we coded in assembler. That's why it took months to port code from one device to another. A friend of mine has just ported two full EA games in 30 hours. Can you imagine how long it would have taken had you to port it from Z80 to 6502? Far more problematic is porting from one language to another, but that's another whole can of worms. You have a straight choice, write production quality code in your prefered language and live with any minor performance issues, or write software for a processor and live with the fact that you will probably have to code the lot again in the future. Having said that there is one alternative, use Elate, then you have binary portability and you shouldn't have to compile the damn thing every again.