Post Az5xFzFbOtHrCQnEIK by alexr@mastodon.online
(DIR) More posts by alexr@mastodon.online
(DIR) Post #Az5xFxyCA7ljE9doWW by regehr@mastodon.social
2025-10-10T20:44:06Z
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was just chatting with a former student about how much interesting compiler work never gets written up, and of course other work is written up and then forgotten.on that topic, was there ever a good overview or retrospective for Microsoft's Phoenix compiler? and does anyone have an educated guess as to how many engineer-years they put into it?
(DIR) Post #Az5xFzFbOtHrCQnEIK by alexr@mastodon.online
2025-10-11T00:04:26Z
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@regehr I'm way more interested in IBM's Montana project (Visual Age C++ that was more about ASTs than text files). They pivoted to Java and the useful stuff (C++) vanished.
(DIR) Post #Az5xG0FzevC6Jvz3Xk by brouhaha@mastodon.social
2025-10-11T06:03:48Z
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@alexr @regehr After the pivot away from Smalltalk.I am rather sad about that, though I understand why it happened.
(DIR) Post #Az5xG13cgOtQnrCgts by brouhaha@mastodon.social
2025-10-11T06:07:10Z
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@alexr @regehr Though I never had the opportunity to program in Smalltalk professionally.I only programmed in Java professionally for less than a year.I'm mostly an embedded systems guy, by which I mean bare metal or RTOS, not Linux or BSD systems. Neither Smalltalk nor Java are suitable for the typical things I do.
(DIR) Post #Az5xG1nhv3kx6mlUjQ by alexr@mastodon.online
2025-10-11T08:18:32Z
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@brouhaha @regehr And yet many universities “taught operating systems” using Java.
(DIR) Post #Az5xG2YV75BdRuerfU by foone@digipres.club
2025-10-11T09:17:50Z
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@alexr @brouhaha @regehr my college was officially 100% java, and yet taught operating systems classes. how? they had to waste the first couple weeks of every OS/advanced data structures classes TEACHING EVERYONE C AGAIN
(DIR) Post #Az5xJXOOuz2rxQbMYK by foone@digipres.club
2025-10-11T09:18:36Z
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@alexr @brouhaha @regehr because they couldn't assume everyone knew C by just making it a prereq, because they were officially all-java. but teaching those classes in java was just impossible, so they just taught you C again
(DIR) Post #Az7kKuaTFwN761UZFo by goosey@mastodon.sdf.org
2025-10-12T06:02:14Z
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@foone @alexr @brouhaha @regehr When I was working on a CS degree in the early to mid 90's there was a lot of drama about this. The CS profs said real CS is mostly math and exactly which language is used isn't really important (*).Non-CS majors who just needed a CS credit or needed to know one language to do their stuff in just wanted something available and sane.My fellow CS nerds were all for C and C++. I got distracted and wanted to learn all the languages!!!(1/?)
(DIR) Post #AzBnI2cg05nBdzgbtw by wndxlori@ruby.social
2025-10-14T04:54:25Z
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@foone @alexr @brouhaha @regehr So be fair, in the early 80’s I was taught several languages (but not C) and then the OS course just used C and the prof expected us to pick it up as we went. And we did.Mono-cultures are never a good idea