Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SUN.COM!wmb
From: wmb@SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Forth Programs (was Forth learning curve)
Message-ID: <8912282252.AA10225@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 28 Dec 89 20:49:26 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Forth Interest Group International List <FIGI-L%SCFVM.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 39

> > "It was just dumb luck that Unix managed to break through the Stupidity
> > Barrier and become popular in spite of its inherent elegance."
> > -- gavin@krypton.sgi.com

> Which elegance are you talking about?  The elegance which requires > 1 Meg of
> RAM to run with any performance?  Or the elegance which eats 30% of the CPU
> cycles?  ;-)

This "30% of the CPU cycles" number is nonsense.  I wish Forth programmers
would quit making such unfounded claims about Unix eating cycles.  It makes
Forth look bad in the Unix community because Unix people think that Forth
people don't know what they are talking about (which is often true).

My Sun Forth product runs maybe 3% slower under Unix than it runs standalone,
without Unix, and differences of this magnitude are basically irrelevant,
besides being hard to measure.

Of course, if other processes are running at the same time, things can slow
down, but nobody forces you to run other processes.

It may be true that there are some Unix implementations where the scheduler
overhead approaches 30%, but that is not the fault of Unix itself.
The overhead of Sun's Unix isn't anywhere near 30%.

The ">1 Meg of RAM" thing is true, but it was not always that way. Unix
used to run just dandy on a PDP-11 with 256K or less.  When I started
working for Sun, Unix used to work just fine in 1 Meg.  The increase in
size came about because people started demanding more and more features,
particularly such things as extensive networking support and window systems.

Everything these days takes at least a megabyte; my 512K Mac won't hardly
run any popular programs anymore.  Forth is small because it has resisted
the addition of many features which appear to be necessary for commercial
acceptance.

Small is beautiful, but it doesn't sell products; not when a megabyte
of RAM only costs $100.

Mitch