*BSD News Article 17678


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From: cmaeda+@cs.cmu.edu (Christopher Maeda)
Subject: Re: Choosing a Unix like OS for a pc
Message-ID: <C9E4J4.Fsw.1@cs.cmu.edu>
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Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
References: <C8wC29.9qq@world.std.com> <201f9p$kkv@klaava.Helsinki.FI> <203s5k$j9u@urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 16:01:45 GMT
Lines: 33

In article <203s5k$j9u@urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de> dak@messua.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (David Kastrup) writes:
>torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) writes:
>
>>In article <C8wC29.9qq@world.std.com> jimr@world.std.com (James A Robinson) writes:
>
>>To give minix some credit: Bruce Evans told me he was able to recompile
>>the kernel in less than one minute if I remember correctly.  Of course,
>>he has a reasonably fast machine and minix sources are smaller, but the
>>main time-saver is that the minix (and coherent) C-compilers are much
>>faster than gcc...  Not that I would trade the compilers, but if you are
>>looking for speed of compilation, minix and coherent both do it faster
>>than either linux or 386bsd (at the expense of features and code
>>quality). 
>
>And to give another one credit: I believe that the original Oberon system
>(windowing OS, OO-variant of Modula-2-compiler...) was able to recompile
>itself in the matter of a few seconds. (CPU NS32032 or similar).
>Of course this is a minimalistic working environment, nedding only a few
>100k in toto. (If I remember right, about 250k, including compiler,
>editor and loader). BTW, one of the persons to credit is Niklaus Wirth,
>and I've forgotten the name of the other one.

What a breakthrough!  If you want your kernel to compile twice as
fast, use a compiler that's twice as dumb or leave out half the
functionality.  You guys should write a paper for usenix.



-- 
Chris Maeda, Grad Student and RetroGrouch <cmaeda@cs.cmu.edu>
"A unix signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of
a black velvet clown painting. It's a rectangle of carets surrounding
a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who."