[plug] [link] Linus and the fire-hose

[Harry McNally]

On 10 Feb 2003 01:02:34 -0000 "Simon Scott" <sscott at iinet.net.au> wrote:

> Anyone who has done bit-bashing can tell you that architecture specific
> optimizations can be one of the best ways to squeeze performance. I guess
> these days some of this is handled by the compiler, but still certain
> optimizations would be unknown to the compiler. Im guessing it would be like
> the difference between using the blitter and not using the blitter on an Amiga
> :)

Graphics is a prickly example but any hardware specific speedups are going to
be handled by the drivers, yes ? Drivers take advantage of the hardware features
but the driver can still be written in C.

> Guessing aside, does anyone have much of an idea about the realities of this?
> Is Linux simply 'coded better'? Or perhaps I am wrong and windows is also
> platform independent?

I don't think you are giving C compilers enough credit for optimisation.

And maybe the argument needs to separate hardware features from core OS
structure and algorithms.

cu
Harry

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