Re: Shrinking the C core

[Arthur Miller]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Very interesting discussion going on for a long time.
>>
>> I think you are all correct, and wrong to an extent, but I believe that
>> nobody has touched the fundamental issue: emacs design is flawed beyond
>> repair for todays machines. Not necessarily in pejorative meaning, but
>> to repair Emacs you would have to significantly rework internals, to the
>> point of entire design rewrite. Emacs is a child of its time (like
>> everything else). It was designed for the time of single-core slow
>> machine, and its design makes sense in that perspective. However, for
>> todays multicore machines, the fact that a lisp machine is slapped on
>> top of an existing text editor (Gosslings I guess), and everything is
>> shared via global state, can't be addressed in any other way but to
>> rewrite Emacs core from ground up. No amount of patch slapping onto the
>> current design can compensate for the lack of appropriate desing.
>
> Unix was designed for 16-bit uniprocessor machines, where the only form
> of ``interlocking'' was:
>
>    int x = spltty ();
>    splx (x);
>
> But today, both free BSD Unix and proprietary Unix scale to SMPs with
> hundereds of processors, exploiting intricate interlocking around
> individual kernel data structures.  The perfect antithesis to your
> standpoint...

In which way is it "the perfect antithesis" to my standpoint, and what
is my standpoint?

If you wrote:

"where the only form of ``interlocking'' **is**",

than it would certainly be a "perfect anthithesis", but since you are
using the term *was* it means it *is no more*, a past tense, something
that has changed, and change is what I have suggested.

I think you are missunderstanding what I am saying: I am saying that
design needs to be changed; and the other thing is that I am suggesting
to rewrite the core API in CL instead of C, since you will get all those
things that constitute the Lisp Machine out for free; a better garbage
collector, a better threading, and better Lisp that are people are often
asking for. Of course you can implement all that stuff in C as well, it
just that it means redoing work that other people has done elsewhere.