At 01:51 PM 9/5/1999 -0700, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>Yes, I intended the depressing aspects of the analogy. However, notice how
>little most of us care anymore about the instruction set. People who write
>code generators or operating systems are still put through hell, but their
>efforts save the rest of us from that hell. We are already approaching the
>same fortunate situation regarding jvms. Pick your battles. I no more
>want to fight the jvm tidal wave than I want to fight the x86 one.
Well, we pay a bit more than that. We pay for the small number of registers. We pay for the cycle cost of implementing a poor instruction set. All of this we pay for in poor performance. I note that Apple is now claiming, "Rather than being just 35% faster, the new Power Mac G4 is up to a stunning 100% to 200% faster than the fastest Pentium III-based PCs." (http://www.apple.com/powermac/).