Caspian comments on Fast Minds and Slow Computers - Less Wrong

26 Post author: jacob_cannell 05 February 2011 10:05AM

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Comment author: loqi 05 February 2011 10:43:57PM *  2 points [-]

The serial speed of a workstation would be limited, but with that much memory at your disposal you could have many workstations active at once.

You may not get a huge speedup developing individual software components, but for larger projects you'd be the ultimate software development "team": The effective output of N programmers (where N is the number of separable components), with near-zero coordination overhead (basically, the cost of task-switching). In other words, you'd effectively bypass Brook's law.

So why not build your own OS and compiler(s), heavily optimized for speed and parallelism? You could always fall back on study and writing while you're waiting for 10,000 compiles to finish.

EDIT: You'd also have an enormous amount of time to search for highly modular designs that benefit maximally from your anti-Brookian development constraints.

Comment author: Caspian 06 February 2011 02:07:51AM 0 points [-]

I would hope to have been given programming interfaces that didn't have a multi-fortnight compile time. I think a primitive assembly language and a way of specifying logic circuits would be easy to provide. Books about language and OS design would also be good - quite likely existing languages wouldn't be optimal for nearly instant compiling. I'd look at Forth as a possible language rather than any I currently use. There should be workstations with graphics output controlled by programmable analogue circuits for once you work out how to program them efficiently.