#Jamii Brandon’s summary of #Zig memory safety: “Zig removes some of the most egregious footguns from c, has better defaults, makes some good practices more ergonomic, and benefits from a fresh start in the standard library (eg using slices everywhere). But it does not nearly approach the level of systematic prevention of memory unsafety that rust achieves,” citing use-after-free, use-after-realloc, and invalidating an interior pointer to a union as examples “I often run into”. Lots of information about #performance of different programming language design choices, for example in Rust or Azul’s Zing garbage collector.
Example #Zig code to peek at your runtime call stack.
Jenn writes about her dad posthumously coming out when she found his love letters and met his lover Edward; heartbreaking. She talks about how she came out to him years before.
discussion of #performance of computers that could have been used to design the 80386: “Top of the line VAX in 1984 was the 8600 with a 12.5 MHz internal clock, doing about 2 million instructions per second.
IBM 3084 [mainframe] from 1984 - quad SMP (four processors) at 38 MHz internal clock, about 7 million instructions per second, per processor.” That was when #mainframes were fast, rather than just having a lot of I/O.
#IBM 3084 #mainframes cost US$8.7 million in 01983. “The machine uses two model K 3081 Processor Units with 64Kb of fast buffer memory. Each 3081 K Processor Unit is composed of two processors.” As for #performance: “The 3084 was released with either 32, 48 or 64 Mb of memory. The system in the collection has 16 Mb of main memory (because it is half of the entire 3084 system). The memory has a cycle time of 312 nanoseconds and is 8 bytes wide.” So I guess you could read or write main memory at 24 megabytes per second, which suggests a speed around 24 MIPS. #history
#IBM 3084 #mainframes page. #history
#IBM 3084QX #performance was 31 MIPS. #mainframes #history
Lynn Wheeler describes the #IBM 3081 #mainframes effort as “quick-and-dirty” in response to the Amdahl threat; he says it was “The 370 emulator minus the FS [Future System] microcode”. Lynn explains, “Amdahl two processor had better throughput than four processor 3084.” #history
discussion of #performance of old computers. anthk reports, “With a 486 and 16MB of RAM, you can run X at sane speeds, even FVWM in wireframe mode to avoid window repaintings upon moving/resizing them.
Next, TLS/SSL. WIth a 486 DX you can use dropbear/bearssl and even #Dillo happily with just a light lag upong handhaking, good enough for TLS 1.2. Under a 486, a 30-35? year old CPU. IRC over TLS, SSH with RSA256 and the like methods, web browsing/Gemini under Dillo with TLS. Doable, I did it under VM, it worked, even email and NNTP over TLS with a LibreSSL fork against BearSSL.” And accrual reports, “I did some multitasking recently on my iDX4-100 + 64MB FPM. I used NT4 with SP2 because the full SP6 was much slower. I could have a browser open, PuTTY, and some tracker music playing no problem. :)” A 486 is something like 11–46 Dhrystone MIPS.