My local university used to teach MIPS, and as of some years ago they’ve switched to RISC-V.
The final assignment at the time I took it was to write a program which compiles a subset of ARM machine code into RISC-V machine code, which was a challenging but so rewarding thing for a younger me to cut my teeth on.
It was a surprisingly modern class too. The in-class material was learning about pipelining, instruction/memory latency, and general CPU concepts, while the assignment and lab material was focused on writing RISC-V assembly and implementing more and more complex programs.
MIPS is great. You can learn it in great depth and fully understand the whole microprocessor while compacting it into a single class. You can make your own adder and multiplier with logic gates. It’s a scope that you can actually master
I agree. It's a shame that MIPS is mostly dead at this point.
(And a moment of silence for SPARC and OpenSPARC T1/T2 in particular - full 64-bit CPUs that were used in production.)
However, RISC-V shares most of the implementation benefits of MIPS, is unencumbered by IP issues, and seems to be steadily improving in terms of software and hardware support.
RISC-V has slightly more complicated instruction formats, but is otherwise feels a lot like a cleaned up and simplified MIPS.
The fact that you can easily see MIPS's 16 bit and (most of) 26 bit immediates in a hex editor is one low-key advantage (for teaching) that MIPS has over RISC-V.
But overall RISC-V is a much better teaching ISA. One great thing about is that there is a core version of the RISC-V spec that only has 47 instructions and essentially nothing else. There is no Memory Paging or Privileged Supervisor mode, and you can skip implementing proper exceptions to make the design even simpler.
We learned MIPS assembly as a small part of the computer architecture class at my university, in the first half of the 90s. It makes sense that RISC-V is the modern choice.
Irreducible loops (loops with more than one way to enter) are not representable by structured control flow. It's possible to model with with state variables (e.g. loop over switch). Incidentally if irreducible control flow is modeled this way (set the control variable to a constant and then branch back to the loop header which immediately then switches on the variable), and the compiler performs jump threading with constant propagation (i.e. duplicate the loop header up to the switch, and fold the switch), the resulting control graph will again have irreducible control flow. In fact it will be the same as the original control flow graph. So it's possible to undo the inefficiency of the state variable with some transformations in the Wasm consumer.
Supposedly, usr was supposed to be “user”[0] but was switched after the Unix guys needed more disk space and split the file system into the / and /usr mount points.
Then /home was made because /usr was filled up with other things.
I agree with the sentiment, but does Swift actually see any usage outside of Apple’s own hardware? I think Swift’s reliance on such an optimization is justified since the hardware this optimization is applied to is the main target.
While Swift’s approach may be slower in theory, is it actually slower in practice? Just a thought.
Hardly, but having to design hardware to fix ARC performance, proves the point how much "better" it is.
Depends how much one cares about performance beyond iOS GUI apps, specially when Swift's original goal was to become the main language across the whole Apple stack.
Thanks, this is what I was wondering! Seems a new language needs to have 200 repos which use it before GitHub will consider adding syntax highlighting for it..
No, you’re definitely right. I’m not sure where the author of this article got the idea that Lebanese citizens are in any way “turning to cryptocurrency”. Most blanket statements about losing faith in banks and whatnot come from a Mark Iskandar, who is a CEO of a cryptocurrency company, the one who set up the bitcoin atms mentioned.
The article briefly mentions power problems, before misleadingly suggesting a solution is to trade bitcoin instead of mining it, because “no machines are involved in the trading process” (false). Later on in the article, the crypto company responsible for the atms says their solution is to rent electricity from other people to mine in exchange for a bit of money, which is heavily downplaying the amount of power needed to make mining profitable.
Unless I’m missing something, this article seems to have a lot of text, but doesn’t actually say much.
For example, my laptop (https://support.hp.com/ph-en/document/c07686423 I think) has a taskbar icon for the touchpad and a taskbar icon for the AMD graphics. Neither of those things are custom parts, just default out of the factory.
The final assignment at the time I took it was to write a program which compiles a subset of ARM machine code into RISC-V machine code, which was a challenging but so rewarding thing for a younger me to cut my teeth on.
It was a surprisingly modern class too. The in-class material was learning about pipelining, instruction/memory latency, and general CPU concepts, while the assignment and lab material was focused on writing RISC-V assembly and implementing more and more complex programs.