> It was a fully graphical 800x1024 (or 1024x1024) system running on 1982 processors.
I've looked into in that. Blit was monochrome, had an 8Mhz processor, and a relatively large 256KB framebuffer which could but directly written to. There were only a handful commands, mostly concerned with copying (blitting) bitmaps around.
Rob Pike only wrote the first version of the graphics routines - the slowest version, in C(!). It was rewritten another four times over, by Locanthi and finally Reiser.
I don't think any credit should go to Pike for implementing the performance-critical parts of that system.
https://9p.io/cm/cs/doc/87/archtr.ps.gz
> Perhaps not but it does mean you've "written a program where performance really mattered" which I believe was the original claim?
No, it doesn't mean that. You can be wasteful on constrained hardware as well, performance doesn't necessarily matter even on the simplest chips, if what you want to do doesn't need the full capabilities of the system.
However, I am specifically replying to the claim that "Rob Pike probably knows a thing or two about performance". As you can see, Rob Pike handed off performance-critical work to someone else. He probably didn't know how to write optimal code for that particular platform, but even if he did, most of that knowledge wouldn't transfer over to modern systems.
At the very least, he didn't care about optimizing that stuff, or he wouldn't have handed it off. He would've enjoyed optimizing that stuff. And that's all completely fine, not every programmer needs to care about performance. I just refuse to take advice from these people about performance or "premature optimization", because it is uninformed.
I've looked into in that. Blit was monochrome, had an 8Mhz processor, and a relatively large 256KB framebuffer which could but directly written to. There were only a handful commands, mostly concerned with copying (blitting) bitmaps around.
Rob Pike only wrote the first version of the graphics routines - the slowest version, in C(!). It was rewritten another four times over, by Locanthi and finally Reiser.
I don't think any credit should go to Pike for implementing the performance-critical parts of that system.
https://9p.io/cm/cs/doc/87/archtr.ps.gz
> Perhaps not but it does mean you've "written a program where performance really mattered" which I believe was the original claim?
No, it doesn't mean that. You can be wasteful on constrained hardware as well, performance doesn't necessarily matter even on the simplest chips, if what you want to do doesn't need the full capabilities of the system.
However, I am specifically replying to the claim that "Rob Pike probably knows a thing or two about performance". As you can see, Rob Pike handed off performance-critical work to someone else. He probably didn't know how to write optimal code for that particular platform, but even if he did, most of that knowledge wouldn't transfer over to modern systems.
At the very least, he didn't care about optimizing that stuff, or he wouldn't have handed it off. He would've enjoyed optimizing that stuff. And that's all completely fine, not every programmer needs to care about performance. I just refuse to take advice from these people about performance or "premature optimization", because it is uninformed.