In the "VLIW Questions" article in November, Peter Wayner states, "VLIW [very large instruction word] is a new way to attack an old problem." But VLIW is what used to be called microcode. End users could write microcode through hardware options on systems from Data General and DEC, though few were desperate enough for the performance to do so. Look at the internals of systems as far back as IBM 360 and 370 mainframes, and you'll see similar techniques. I'm much more impressed by efforts such as Motorola's PowerPC 620, which packs many support systems and mainframe-level techniques into a single chip.
Like microcode, much of what is old is new again, but smart compilers are an important part of VLIW, whereas microcode was written by hand.--Peter Wayner
Flexible C++
Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it
is
theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.
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