BGB, > or, maybe all my x86 experience blinds me some to the "elegance" of > ARM's ISA?... > whatever is so great about it, well, I am not seeing it at this level. > > why then do so many people seem to complain that the x86 ISA is so > horrible?...
I think this is completely off topic for this list, but it would be rude to leave your without an answer. Back in 1988 I wrote an ARM emulator for the PC and a 8086 emulator for the ARM and can tell you that the ARM was so much "cleaner" than the x86 that it was hard to compare them. When you add a hack to go from 26 to 32 bit addressing, an object oriented MMU from Apple, floating point, 16 bit encoding (Thumb), Java compatibility, DSP and so on then it would be suprising if the core simplicity of the ARM didn't get buried way deep. Of course, if you are not using segments (and nobody is, these days) then you are only programming in a limited subset of the x86 and I can see how it can look elegant (see what Chuck Moore does on a Pentium for his ColorForth, for example). -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
