From: mailto:fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2015 8:15 AM
To: fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: 1.47% Speed Improvement in the Benchmarks in the git HEAD
On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 7:03 PM, 'Gary Campbell' gary_at_numin8r.us [fc-solve-discuss] <fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com> wrote:
I’ve been retired from being a paid software engineer since 1991.
Some 15 years before that I decided to tackle the problem of code
(especially assembly language) being hard to read (and write).
In fact, assembly language is not especially hard to read or write. It's just painful to maintain.
***(GDC) I’ve found my assembly language pretty easy to maintain, but then I’ve had nearly
40 years of history with it.
I developed a WYSIWYG block structured assembly language and
an assembler for it written in itself.
Did you hear about HLA (High Level Assembler) from Randall Hyde ?
*** (GDC) Nope. People who invent languages seldom look for a way around it, they love it!
Back in the 80s, I also wrote my own tools, because nothing was available at that time (I was coding in 6502).
While it's interesting to deeply understand how a computer works, I believe it's not really necessary anymore.
***(GDC) Again, some things are done for the fun of it, and someone does have to understand them.
However, my solver only runs on the old version of Windows XP due
to the fact that my assembler only outputs a .COM file which is no
longer acceptable to the latest operating systems.
This made me decide to suspend work on Freecell and revisit my
assembler. There is no doubt in my mind that it makes a unique
contribution to assemblers, and even to the design of compilers
and languages in general, so I’m off on another project to bring
it up to date with 32-bit processors and the PE/COFF object file
formats. This ought to keep me busy until I’m into my mid-to-
late –70’s! Then, maybe I’ll bring my Freecell project onto the
latest machines.
In 1999, I wrote a distributed project into assembly language.
This was necessary, because computers had around 16 Mb of RAM at the time.
With one of my programs, I used 128 years of computing power to solve a diophantine equation, and the project reached around 20% of the whole search space.
5 years ago, someone rewrote the program by using a table-based approach, and the computation has been distributed on Boinc.
The result is that the entire computation was done in 3 or 4 months, in other words a magnitude of order faster.
So if you want to make good use of the latest computers, you have to think in tables/hashtables, because 16Gb are common right now.
If anyone is interested in any of this, you should probably contact
me directly, since it diverges from the main intent of this group.
Why don't you open-source your tools ?
Create an account on github, and share your pet projects.
***(GDC) Thanks, I’ll take this under advisement.
JC
Received on Fri Jul 17 2015 - 07:17:31 IDT