On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 3:25 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon <[email protected] > wrote:
> > I've not read it closely, but it seems we have here > http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/repo/slitch/src/tcpip.lisp<http://fresh.homeunix.net/%7Eluke/misc/repo/slitch/src/tcpip.lisp> > an implementation of TCP/IP in lisp in less than one thousand lines > including comments. > > The core of TCP/IP is indeed not big. Mind you, it had to run on computers > of 40 years ago, so it just COULD NOT be big! > > Honestly? I don't think your conclusion makes sense. TCP/IP does have flaws, they have been documented in the literature and unfortunately not really explained by VPRI, but its model size is roughly the "natural size" for a networking stack. When you speak of TCP/IP being "big", we're really talking here about either model size, or implementation size. Implementation size is historically very misleading. For example, X Windowing system effectively introduced "shared libraries" to UNIX, creating horrible verisonability issues, simply because the system itself was so monolithic that shared libraries was the only way to reduce bloat. But it was fundamentally done incorrectly -- in DLL Hell fashion -- and created massive security vulnerabilities. TCP/IP and windowing systems both show how dumb modern operating system design is. TCP/IP is not VPRI's only example, and currently it may not even be a killer example, since it is not literate enough and not hooked into a (loosely speaking) HyperCard-like system. What shocks me looking at Mark Guzdial's post providing Alan Kay's position on education, is that Mark doesn't seem to actually know how to Google for VPRI's work. He asks Alan for the example, rather than being aware of, say, Dan Amelgang's replacement for jitblt. jitblt reduces the size of pixman by an order of magnitude, but it does not preserve the same performance characteristics or currently afford the ability to reason about model tradeoffs.
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