Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!sun-barr!newstop!sun!snafu!lm
From: lm@snafu.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Speed costs (Re: MWC's Coherent - A Lemon...)
Message-ID: <136298@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 27 May 90 19:04:17 GMT
References: <2793@crash.cts.com> <265D2FE5.2513@tct.uucp> <640@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: lm@sun.UUCP (Larry McVoy)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 19

In article <640@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall) writes:
>Not entirely. Sure it would be nice if all code was compact, but
>achieving it isn't free. I too did my first serious programming on
>PDP-11's (running RT-11 which left one with less the 64k (~45k ?) to
>work in). I spent a *lot* of time shoe horning programs into limited
>space. Younger programmers might not have the same skills in that
>area, but they *don't need them*. We all have to get used to the fact
>that memory is now about $80/MB and swap space is about $10/MB. By the
>time the project you are working on is finished, these prices might
>have halved. There is just no point in being too stingy with either!

Yes there is.  It takes time to load that 5meg application.  Disk time,
page fault time.  It takes cache lines, which are not plentiful.

The fact that memory is, currently, cheap does not give us the right
to squander it.  Last I checked a xclock was 1.3 megs.  Is this
reasonable?
---
Larry McVoy, Sun Microsystems     (415) 336-7627       ...!sun!lm or lm@sun.com