🚀 go-pugleaf

I agree with you on your opinion of JPI Modula-2 V2. I think that V1 was much
better. I really hated the long compilation time V2 exhibits, even if you
turn all optimizations off. It is my impression that if you turn them off, the
code is already optimized, if you turn them on, the compiler burns millions of
additional CPU cycles to get the last few percent of run-time improvement. But
maybe this is what most people are looking for. They are used to slow
compilations anyway (and do not understand where the productivity benefit of
fast compilations lays) and they heard so much about optimizations from
Microsoft that they will not buy a product unless it is optimizing. -:)

However, I do not understand why you would like to get a cheap system based on
the NS32000. The NS32000 is quite a clean architecture, but it is slow and it
will remain so. It is just too CISCy, especially in terms of unnecessarily
complicated interpretation of data structures at run-time (I am thinking at
the module and link tables). NS is not going to develop this family further
(the new architecture is the "Swordfish", a rather conventional RISC chip),
so you will be stuck with the current highest performing members of the
family: the 532 and the GX32. In fact, everybody at our lab has his workstation
based on the NS32000 family (the "Ceres" workstation) and we are quite
content with it and the "module" features in the chip are used in our Oberon
system (the newest development of Wirth). However, even we considered changing
it not to use the "module" features because it would be only slightly more
complicated and a lot faster. Nobody changed it at the moment (since people
have other stuff to do), but eventually somebody may do it.

On the long run we may turn our heads completely away from the NS32000. If we
want workstations with more than 5 MIPS there is no other way than to change
to a different architecture. I do not know what this architecture will be, but
I am quite sure that the change will occur in the next two years.

In other words: on the long run, the NS32000 is a dead end.

Cheers,


Marc-Michael Brandis
Computer Systems Laboratory, ETH-Zentrum (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
email: brandis@inf.ethz.ch