• ramble81@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        My thoughts on software in general over the past 20 years. So many programs inefficiently written and in 4th level languages just eats up any CPU/memory gain. (Less soap box and more of a curious what if to how fast things would be if we still wrote highly optimized programs)

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          Answer: there’d be far less software in the world, it would all be more archaic and less useful, and our phones and laptops would just sit at 2% utilization most of the time.

          There’s an opportunity cost to everything, including fussing over whether that value can be stored as an int instead of a double to save 8 bits of space. High level languages let developers express their feature and business logic faster, with fewer bugs, and much lower ongoing maintenance costs.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I fully concur. There’s tons of really inefficient software out there that wastes resources just because for a long time, available resources grew fast enough to just keep using more of them without the net speed of an application slowing down. If we didn’t have so many lazy SW devs, I suspect the reduction in needed CPU cycles would have a measurable positive effect on climate change.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
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          7 months ago

          The website title says “Arm Developer”, not “ARM Developer”, in a clearly non-acronym way so it’s a guide for making prosthetic hardware. Of course you want a cyborg arm to parse JS natively, why else even get one?

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Nope it’s still a register-register op, that’s very much load-store architecture.

          It’s reduced, not minimalist, otherwise every RISC CPU out there would only have one instruction like decrement and branch if nonzero. RISC-V would not have an extension mechanism. The instruction exists because it makes things faster because you don’t have to do manual bit-fiddling over 10 instructions to achieve a thing already-existing ALU logic can do in a single cycle. A thing that isn’t even javascript-specific (or terribly relevant to json), it’s a specific float to int cast with specific rounding and overflow mode. Would it more palatable to your tastes if the CPU were to do macro-op fusion on 10(!) instructions to get the same result?

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          7 months ago

          No, that’s not what RISC is about. There was some early attempts to keep the number of instructions low–originally, ARM didn’t have a multiply instruction, and there’s still a bunch of microcontrollers you can buy that don’t have a divide instruction–but it was quickly abandoned as it’s just not that useful. It only holds back instructions that optimize common cases. Your compiler can implement multiplication by doing addition in a loop, but that’s not very efficient.

          What really worked about it was keeping a separation between how memory is accessed. You don’t have an ADD instruction that can fetch from both registers or main memory. You have a MOV instruction that can fetch from memory into a register, and you have an ADD instruction that can work on registers.

          ARM still does this just fine.

          • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works
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            7 months ago

            I’m a computer engineering major (still a student tbf), I’m well aware of the difference between CISC and RISC, I was making a joke.

            Also, I understand your point, but you should know though that a load-store architecture and a RISC instruction set are not the same thing. The vast majority of RISC ISAs are load-store, but not all load-store architectures are RISC.

            • frezik@midwest.social
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              7 months ago

              http://www.quadibloc.com/arch/sriscint.htm

              The RISC architecture contains several common elements. Some of them are no longer present in most chips that still call themselves RISC:

              • All instructions execute in a single cycle.
              • Floating-point operations, specifically, are therefore excluded.

              But most of the defining characteristics of RISC do remain in force:

              • All instructions occupy the same amount of space in memory.
              • Only load, store, and jump instructions directly address memory. Calculations are performed only between operands in registers.

              https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/IZP5KUJprHw?pli=1

              MOST RISCs:
              3a) Have 1 size of instruction in an instruction stream
              3b) And that size is 4 bytes
              3c) Have a handful (1-4) addressing modes) (* it is VERY hard to count these things; will discuss later).
              3d) Have NO indirect addressing in any form (i.e., where you need one memory access to get the address of another operand in memory)
              4a) Have NO operations that combine load/store with arithmetic, i.e., like add from memory, or add to memory. (note: this means especially avoiding operations that use the value of a load as input to an ALU operation, especially when that operation can cause an exception. Loads/stores with address modification can often be OK as they don’t have some of the bad effects)
              4b) Have no more than 1 memory-addressed operand per instruction
              5a) Do NOT support arbitrary alignment of data for loads/stores
              5b) Use an MMU for a data address no more than once per instruction
              6a) Have >=5 bits per integer register specifier
              6b) Have >= 4 bits per FP register specifier

              Note that none of this has to do with reducing the number of instructions, which is what people tend to think of when they hear the name.

              • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                7 months ago

                All instructions occupy the same amount of space in memory.

                Both ARM and RISC-V have compressed instructions. Dunno how ARM works but with RISC-V the 16-bit instruction set is freely interspersable with the 32 bit one, which also get their alignment reduced to 16 bits. Gets like 95% of the space reduction possible with full variable-width instructions without overcomplicating the insn decoder.

                As to addressing and loads and arithmetic: No such instructions, but every CPU but the tiniest ones are expected to do macro-op fusion for things like indexed loads. Here’s an overview.

                The MMU thing… well the vector extension can do gather/scatter, I guess it could stay within the letter of “use the MMU once” but definitely not the spirit.

      • vvvvv@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        106 Gbps

        They get to this result on 0.6 MB of data (paper, page 5)

        They even say:

        Moreover, there is no need to evaluate our design with datasets larger than the ones we have used; we achieve steady state performance with our datasets

        This requires an explanation. I do see the need - if you promise 100Gbps you need to process at least a few Tbs.

        • neatchee@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Imagine you have a car powered by a nuclear reactor with enough fuel to last 100 years and a stable output of energy. Then you put it on a 5 mile road that is comprised of the same 250 small segments in various configurations, but you know for a fact that starts and ends at the same elevation. You also know that this car gains exactly as much performance going downhill as it loses going uphill.

          You set the car driving and determine that, it takes 15 minutes to travel 5 miles. You reconfigure the road, same rules, and do it again. Same result, 15 minutes. You do this again and again and again and always get 15 minutes.

          Do you need to test the car on a 20 mile road of the same configuration to know that it goes 20mph?

          JSON is a text-based, uncompressed format. It has very strict rules and a limited number of data types and structures. Further, it cannot contain computational logic on it’s own. The contents can interpreted after being read to extract logic, but the JSON itself cannot change it’s own computational complexity. As such, it’s simple to express every possible form and complexity a JSON object can take within just 0.6 MB of data. And once they know they can process that file in however-the-fuck-many microseconds, they can extrapolate to Gbps from there

          • vvvvv@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Based on your analogue they drive the car for 7.5 inches (614.4 Kb by 63360 inches by 20 divided by 103179878.4 Kb) and promise based on that that car travels 20mph which might be true, yes, but the scale disproportion is too considerable to not require tests. This is not maths, this is a real physical device - how would it would behave on larger real data remains to be seen.

            • neatchee@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Except we know what the lifecycle of physical storage is, it’s rate of performance decay (virtually none for solid state until failure), and that the computers performing the operations have consistent performance for the same operations over time. And again, while for a car such a small amount can’t be reasonably extrapolated, for a computer processing an extremely simple format like JSON, when it is designed to handle FAR more difficult tasks on the GPU involving billions of floating point operations, it is absolutely, without a doubt enough.

              You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want but I’m very confident in my understanding of JSON’s complexity relative to typical GPU workloads, computational analysis, computer hardware durability lifecycles, and software testing principles and best practices. 🤷

        • trolololol@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          But to write such a file you need a few quantum computers map reducing the data in alternative universes

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      7 months ago

      Personally, now that I have a machine capable of running the toolchains, I want to explore hardware accelerated compilation. Not all steps can be done in parallel but I bet a lot before linking can.

  • Xyloph@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    That is sometime the issue when your code editor is a disguised web browser 😅

  • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    I have the same problem with XML too. Notepad++ has a plugin that can format a 50MB XML file in a few seconds. But my current client won’t allow plugins installed. So I have to use VS Code, which chokes on anything bigger than what I could do myself manually if I was determined.

    • bjornsno@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Except if it’s a single line file, only god can help you then. (Or running prettier -w on it before opening it or whatever.)

      • Andrew@mander.xyz
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        6 months ago

        If you’re not aware, it was called MB because of JEDEC when IEC units weren’t invented. IEC units were introduced because they remove the double meaning of JEDEC units — decimal and binary. IEC units only carry the binary meaning, hence why they’re superior. If you convert 1000 kB to 1 MB then use MB, but in case of 1024 KiB to 1 MiB you should be using MiB. It’s all about getting the point across, and JEDEC units aren’t good at it.

        • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 months ago

          I’m failing to understand why we would need decimal units at all. Whats the point of them? And why do the original units havr to change name to something as ridiculous as “Gibibyte” while the unnecessary decimal units get the binary’s old name?

          • Andrew@mander.xyz
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            6 months ago

            You poor innocent soul… I can try to explain why decimal is even mentioned, but it would probably take a lot of time, and I’m not sure if I will be able to clarify things up.

            I can at least say this: 2 TB HDD drive is indeed 2*10^12 B, but suddenly shindow$ in its File Explorer will show you that in fact the drive is only 1.82 TB. But WHY? Everyone asks, feeling scammed. Because HDD spec uses decimal units (SI; MB) and Window$ uses binary units (JEDEC; MB), i.e., 1.82 TiB (IEC; MiB). And macOS also uses JEDEC units, AFAIK.

            More and more FOSS software uses IEC units and KDE Plasma is a good example: file manager, package manager etc. uses IEC units. Simply put, JEDEC added the binary meaning to decimal units, so at first MB (and now) only carried decimal meaning (until JEDEC shit out their standard). And the only reason why “gibibyte” is ridiculous, is because we all grew up with JEDEC interpretation of SI units. So it will take many generations for everyone to adapt xxbityte words into daily conversations. I’m (already) doing my part. It’s just the legacy that we have to deal with.

            All international bodies (BIPM, NIST, EU) agree that the SI prefixes “refer strictly to powers of 10” and that the binary definitions “should not be used” for them.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#IEC_1999_Standard

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Other_standards_bodies_and_organizations

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEDEC_memory_standards#JEDEC_Standard_100B.01

            • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de
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              6 months ago

              Well, thank you for taking the time to write this detailed explanation!

              Windows and MacOS use the abbriviation “MB” referring to the binary units, correct? How come that these big OS’s use another unit than these large international bodies recognize?

              On a side note, I’ve always found it weird why HDDs or SSDs are/were sold with 128GB, 265GB, 512GB etc. when they are referring to decimal units.

              • Andrew@mander.xyz
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                6 months ago

                Windows and MacOS use the abbriviation “MB” referring to the binary units, correct?

                Yez. I’m only sure about the first one, but didn’t test myself whether the macOS is using power of 2 or 10 under the hood (of MB). You can open properties of something big and try converting raw number of bytes with /1024^n and /1000^n and compare the end results.

                How come that these big OS’s use another unit than these large international bodies recognize?

                Legacy, legacy everywhere (IMO). And of course they don’t want to confuse their precious users that don’t know any better. And this also would break some scripts that rely on that specific output. GNU C library also uses JEDEC units by default, hence flatpak and other software.

                On a side note, I’ve always found it weird why HDDs or SSDs are/were sold with 128GB, 265GB, 512GB etc. when they are referring to decimal units.

                It is weird for everyone, because we mainly only count with multiples of 2 when it comes to digital size of information. I didn’t investigate why they use power of 10, but I’ve seen that some other hardware also uses decimal units (I think at least in RAM, but JEDEC is used intentionally or not for CPU cache memory). I had a link where the RAM thingy is lightly addressed, but I couldn’t find it.

                spoiler

                P.S. it’s “OSes” and “macOS” BTW.

  • Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Rockstar making GTA online be like: “Computer, here is a 512mb json file please download it from the server and then do nothing with it”