OT: Requesting C advice

[Mike McCarty]

Rick Stevens wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 14:31 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 

[snip]

>>>As far as the libraries are concerned, the initial draft of what was in
>>>the standard C library made the library so damned big that it wouldn't
>>>fit in the standard process memory footprint of a VAX at the time.
>>
>>Care to substantiate that? As far as the Standard is concerned, it does
>>not address packaging issues.
> 
> 
> I'm talking about the very, very early days of discussing just what goes
> in the libraries--and indeed how many libraries there were going to be.

Ok. Your use of the term "standard C library" is somewhat irregular,
then. That term now has a specific defined meaning. But if that is
what you meant, then fine.

> The working document we had put almost everything in a single library.
> When we implemented it as a test case on the two most common systems we
> had (a PDP-11 and a VAX), the linker couldn't handle the library size.
> Indeed, without segmenting the program and using overlays, the famous
> "hello world" program couldn't fit on a VAX.  Overlays worked, but it
> was spectacularly slow.

One of the first C implementations I used was one on the IBM PC for
PCDOS, with a limit of 64K total code+data. Ever try using overlays on
a two-floppy system? I have.

Grrr, grrr, grrr, was a sound which frequently came not only from the
floppy disc drives, but from other sources as well :-)

[snip]

> 
> As I said, I wasn't there at the end.  The money was an issue, but also
> many of the meetings simply degenerated into finger-pointing sessions. 
> As Charles Shultz once stated in "Peanuts": "Beneath the calm exterior
> lurk the dynamics of a nursery school recess."  All in all, C is a great
> language, but it does have warts.  It's a giraffe...a horse designed by
> a committee.

Plauger and I exchanged a few e-mails during that period, and
he made comments of a similar nature. I got to meet him over
on comp.lang.c 'way back. I'm sure he doesn't remember me, though.

[snip]

Mike
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