Comment by devin
1 year ago
Could I ask why you find yourself working on older machines? Work? A fan of retro computing? Something else?
1 year ago
Could I ask why you find yourself working on older machines? Work? A fan of retro computing? Something else?
It's excellent hardware, I have many redundant copies and thus high availability, the system just works, I automatically take care of efficient implementation, and the generated executables have high probability to work on all newer Linux systems. And I'm too old to always chase for the new new version.
Optimizing your code for slow machines is a really great thing. I wish more people would do it. If your code runs well on a slow computer then it'll run well on anything better too. A lot of code these days only runs "well" on very fast computers...
I mainly develop TXR on a refurbished Intel box with a CPU that's like from around 2009 or something. It takes at least three times longer to rebuild everything than on modern machines. (It does have 32 gigs of RAM which is good for multiple virtual machines.) In fact I have one Dell box that was a server in a startup company that shut down in 2010. And that box builds the code significantly faster.