Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
An embedded researcher friend of mine has posted some data on code sizes from various compilers at http://embed.cs.utah.edu/embarrassing/. The “embarrassing” bit is the idea that compiler writes should be ashamed when other compilers do better than theirs. It is worth looking over the data, even though the methodology and benchmarks are not yet perfect by any means.
Continue reading “Compiler Code Size Comparisons (for Possible Embarrassment)”
I found this quote in Stackoverflow Podcast #68 quite funny in its extreme dislike of parallel programming in C…
Continue reading “Joel Spolsky: You cannot program parallel in C, period”
In FLOSS Weekly issue 57, about 20 minutes into the show, Randall Schwartz and Leo Laporte express genuine surprise that the XMBC media player application is all in C++. That is pretty telling, some parts of the computing world are indeed moving on to more modern pastures like Python, Perl, Ruby, and even Objective C (for the Mac people). And quite a contrast to the EDA world where C++ is still considered the new shiny thing, as I have lamented before… thanks for that small but golden genuine surprise, Randall and Leo!
In the July 2008 issue of IEEE Computer, there is short article called “In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism“, by Ronald P. Loui, a professor at Washington University (WUSTL). The article deals with the issue of what is the appropriate first language to teach new CS (Computer Science) students, and considers that a “scripting” langauge like Python or Ruby might be way better than Java (no doubt about that I think).
The interesting material in the article is the background on WHY he thinks that this is the case. He points to the immense popularity and rise of scripting in much of computing land. In the past ten years, it is clear to him (and I would agree with this too mostly) that languages like Perl, PHP, Awk, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python have eclipse Java and C++ as the most interesting and important programming languages for many practical tasks. Especially for web applications, where Java seems to have a presence but noone would dream of using something as clunky and impractical as C.
What can this teach us for the purpose of simulation and the creation of models of computer system hardware for the purpose of simulation? Maybe a fair bit…
Continue reading “In Praise of Scripting: Something for Modeling as Well?”