Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code vital to its operation

Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by jerf on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @08:45PM (#1670654)

Times were different back then. The article says the original control dates from 1990, and wikipedia confirms that Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 so it is plausible. The 486 had just been released in the previous year, so it was the New Hotness and not very many people had it, so you'd be looking at an install base of mostly 80386s with a substantial contingent of 80286s that your program still needed to run on with acceptable performance. Wikipedia says for the 80286 you're looking at a top-end of 12MHz, with 6 and 8 MHz in the field. Since this is a Windows 3.0 program, you had a minimum of 640KB on the system (though of course you can't use it all).

So this is a program that has to run with reasonable performance on a 12MHz 80286 with 2MB of RAM. Are you sure you wouldn't consider having your UI read and write the disk directly? Separation of concerns is a modern luxury. And remember, you're using compilers from 1990, too. Don't expect great inlining. (Besides, only profligate memory spendthrifts would inline a function.)

(Edit, later followup: In fact, "separation of concerns" is one of the major sources of the "bloat" people complain about when they examine modern OSes. Much of the "non-bloated-ness" of earlier generations of OS doesn't come from programmers caring more about their craft, it comes from programmers having to stuff programs into things that can barely hold them and building "clever things" that we would today consider monstrosities like UI widgets that read and write directly to the disk. I am unsympathetic to accusations that, say, a modern KDE desktop is "bloated".)

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by enneff on Thursday September 09, 2010 @03:52AM (#1674718)

"So this is a program that has to run with reasonable performance on a 12MHz 80286 with 2MB of RAM. Are you sure you wouldn't consider having your UI read and write the disk directly?"

I wrote code for those machines, and no, I wouldn't write my UI code to read and write the disk directly.

"Separation of concerns is a modern luxury."

This is a myth. Merely an excuse for poor API design. Proper abstraction doesn't mean inefficiency.

Your last paragraph (the "Edit") is almost offensive. The cause of bloat is not separation of concerns. It's that people just don't care about writing efficient code (or they just don't know how). Did you ever write code in the era you speak of? Because your statement comes across as ill-informed conjecture.

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by prodigal_erik on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @02:16AM (#1671205)

To be fair, memory bandwidth was relatively better and pipelines were nonexistent, so there was little reason to inline a function unless the call setup was literally longer than the body.

My favorite monstrosity was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_(programming). When your OS couldn't page functions from disk for you, you damn well did it yourself. They even started building it into linkers....

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by m_eiman on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @02:59AM (#1671254)

The madness still exists today. I'm developing an app that runs on a 8-bit 8051 CPU with a 16 bit address bus and 1MB of code Flash... Let's just say that segmentation and function pointers isn't a perfect match. Luckily the next revision of the hardware runs an AVR32 instead, I'm just hoping that the hardware will be ready for the world before the app is!

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by caf on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @01:25AM (#1671122)

It was a rare 286 indeed that came with 2MB of RAM!

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by jerf on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @01:36AM (#1671131)

Yes, I was being a bit generous and assuming that perhaps Microsoft Money didn't have to run on the absolute minimum spec for Windows 3.0. I couldn't find the exact specs Microsoft gave for the original version. Considering that I can chew through 2MB in my programs nowadays if I accidentally sneeze wrong it still makes the point, I think. :)

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by demallien on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @08:39AM (#1671649)

In fact, "separation of concerns" is one of the major sources of the "bloat" people complain about when they examine modern OSes.

Um, what is your source for that assertion? From where I'm standing, separation of concerns is a technique which favorises the re-use of code, and hence the reduction of bloat.

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Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by jerf on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @08:46PM (#1674027)

Separation of concerns at the OS level involves the creation of shared DLLs, and people complaining about bloat inevitably complain about the many megabytes of DLL files that the simplest program needs nowadays, even if it only uses a vanishing fraction of them. People slinging bloat accusations around seem to want a program in which every byte loaded from the disk is executed with high frequency or something.

In my opinion, you're totally correct. This is part of the reason I'm not very sympathetic to the bloat argument. The megabytes of libraries are there for good reasons.

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