Peter Svensson wrote:
> By 2038 you will most likely still find lots of systems being manefactured
> with 4, 8 and 16 bit processors as well as 32-bit ones.
> "If you underpower it - the programmers will probably get it to
> run anyway"
That's the attitude that needs to go away.
Underpowered hardware forces 'clever' coding which is more likely to have
bugs than straightforward coding. Such code tends to break as it is
maintained and tends to be less reliable than code that was designed on
appropriate hardware.
There's been a major move in programming away from 'clever' optimization
and towards writing clean, clear code that is easy to maintain. The goals
tend to have mutually-exclusive aspects.
If you're going to argue that software should be designed to make hardware
become obsolete less quicky, you're going to find that this is a two-way
street. If you want your hardware to last until and past 2038, you're going
to have to make sure that it's adequate not just for what your programmers
can cram into it today, but also for what people will want it to do 30 years
from now.
Design obsolesence into the hardware and then blame it on the software.
Wonderful. IMO, anything we can do to make this technique work better is
ultimately self-destructive. If you design in just the hardware that the
software needs today, your embedded system should break.
DS
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 07 2000 - 21:00:07 EST