Comments on: What should compilers do better? http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/2010/08/11/what-should-compilers-do-better/ Shedding Light on the Hidden World of Embedded Systems Mon, 28 Jul 2014 16:18:37 -0400 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: D.A. @ LI http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/2010/08/11/what-should-compilers-do-better/#comment-1110 D.A. @ LI Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:52:48 +0000 http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/?p=251#comment-1110 Possible prespective: the demand for software has always far out-stripped our ability to produce it, and I don't see this trend ending for decades. So we have higher order languages, infrastructures, clouds, modeling tools, agile development processes (etc) - and we keep pushing the edge on what we can deliver just to survive the market. There are specialized niches where something other than "the need for tons of code" is the main driving force; in these niches some (not all) of the advances are hard to use or even work against the niche constraints. For example, virtualization can require a higher tolerance to temporal jitter, which may be unacceptable to a hard real-time application (depending, or course, on the nature of the deadlines). The pattern I've seen is 1) we can't fulfill the market demands for software 2) there's an innovation in how we do the job 3) some niche applications can't use the innovation 4) a group of specialty vendors go off and modify the innovation 5) more niche application can use the innovation but 6) there are a set of apps that it never works for. You can apply this to languages, operating systems, infrastructure, tools, processes, ... which would be a fun exercise if anyone is interested... There is no fully universal solution because the driving forces are different. Somebody is always going to have to understand the real hardware. IMHO Possible prespective: the demand for software has always far out-stripped our ability to produce it, and I don’t see this trend ending for decades. So we have higher order languages, infrastructures, clouds, modeling tools, agile development processes (etc) – and we keep pushing the edge on what we can deliver just to survive the market. There are specialized niches where something other than “the need for tons of code” is the main driving force; in these niches some (not all) of the advances are hard to use or even work against the niche constraints. For example, virtualization can require a higher tolerance to temporal jitter, which may be unacceptable to a hard real-time application (depending, or course, on the nature of the deadlines).

The pattern I’ve seen is 1) we can’t fulfill the market demands for software 2) there’s an innovation in how we do the job 3) some niche applications can’t use the innovation 4) a group of specialty vendors go off and modify the innovation 5) more niche application can use the innovation but 6) there are a set of apps that it never works for. You can apply this to languages, operating systems, infrastructure, tools, processes, … which would be a fun exercise if anyone is interested…

There is no fully universal solution because the driving forces are different. Somebody is always going to have to understand the real hardware.

IMHO

]]> By: E.G. @ LI http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/2010/08/11/what-should-compilers-do-better/#comment-1109 E.G. @ LI Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:52:18 +0000 http://www.embeddedinsights.com/channels/?p=251#comment-1109 "partitioning and allocating global resources" is this a job for the linker anyhow? “partitioning and allocating global resources” is this a job for the linker anyhow?

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