30 points by leonry 4 days ago | 5 comments
relistan 4 days ago
I don't think the intent of this whole thing is to say that there is no point in modern improvements. But it _is_ good to have some reference on how much we used to get done with so little. Those several decades of complexity growth are buying us some stuff, but maybe not as much as we think.
miohtama 4 days ago
pjmlp 4 days ago
akira2501 4 days ago
These older compilers also did nearly direct translation of your code into assembly, barely did any optimization, and made heavy use of the stack to smooth everything out. Pascal, in particular, due to it's ability to nest procedures and native set types generated some pretty suboptimal code.
It's why we had things like register variables and decent inline assembly primitives.
WesolyKubeczek 4 days ago
4 days ago