80x86

100% agree with dmitrygr.

I was excited when I heard about the project just after it started. However, past experiences taught me to wait before getting excited about the new 'shiny thing'. I did it differently with RISCV. I waited. I am glad I did. It took a long time for actual silicon to appear. Also, the silicon today has all the facepalming special cases mentioned in the article. Its almost like those old soviet era cpus that had the list of bad instructions handwritten on the package.

Overall, RISCV was a minor spin on MIPS, but without really learning from other processors.

So why is everyone still pushing for it? It has the words 'open' on it. People pattern match on that marketing.

As part of that marketing, they also pushed this attitude from the project... 'RISC won'. I think Chester Lam said it best when he wrote his essay stating that RISC didn't win... OoO archs won. I couldn't articulate that nearly as well as he did. If you haven't read it, I recommend it.

So, yeah, here we are. Many people will follow the bandwagon, but they will find that RISCV will not make a significant difference.

I am glad we still have Arm (in all its many forms), x86, and others. (btw, despite my username, I don't think x86 is the best either :-)

Also, if you aren't trying to ship a product, you can experiment with ISAs on an fpga. Yes, fpgas are a lot slower, but they are also a lot more fun. Especially with the great work done to create open source toolchains. Heck, if you are really serious (slighly crazy), you can build your own chip. For the foreseeable future ASIC shuttles are available at prices under $10k. (again, you have to be a little crazy)

It would be nice if PNG supported no compression. That is handy in many situations.

This is interesting, thanks for sharing this. I will look at the JOE editor to see how this is implemented.

I have thought about this problem off and on. Usually the conclusion I come to is that we need a new tty interface. The old tty interface has too much legacy baggage. For example l, in addition to the buffering problem, there is also the key input problem. Ideally, a newer interface would provide scan codes instead of the escape sequences. Not having to deal with ‘escape’ like we do today would simplify things.

rename is atomic, but it is not guaranteed to be durable. In order for rename to be durable, I've learned that you have to fsync the parent directory.

I was saddened when I learned this. I used to use this old trick for a lot of my systems. I learned it from reading the code of old well-written unix systems programs.