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1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

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416 points henry_flower | 2 comments | 19 Feb 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.479s | source
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m4r1k ◴[20 Feb 25 07:27 UTC] No.43112034[source]▶
I once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
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Cthulhu_ ◴[20 Feb 25 09:27 UTC] No.43112772[source]▶
A newer joke is that Ken Thompson (along with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer) designed Go while waiting for C / C++ to compile.
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kragen ◴[21 Feb 25 10:38 UTC] No.43126057[source]▶
Not C/C++. Specifically C++. C compiles pretty fast. And it's not really a joke, though obviously it wasn't a single build they were waiting for.
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pjmlp ◴[21 Feb 25 22:16 UTC] No.43133710[source]▶
Back in 2000, our builds, C modules to be consumed by Tcl, Apache and IIS modules, DB drivers took about one hour per OS for a full platform release.

OS being Windows NT/2000, Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux.

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kragen ◴[21 Feb 25 23:29 UTC] No.43134395[source]▶
Yeah, that's similar to my experience. C++ projects commonly took a week to build in the 90s.
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1. pjmlp ◴[22 Feb 25 06:56 UTC] No.43136737[source]▶
I can assure that wasn't the case in our desktop software for Windows, and that already feels like trolling.

Not even Nokia NetAct took half as much, given its complexity of distributed CORBA services written in C++, nor the CERN TDAQ/HLT builds I was responsible for.

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2. kragen ◴[22 Feb 25 10:54 UTC] No.43137911[source]▶
You were probably working on more competently designed software than I was, but sure, desktop software for Windows usually didn't take that long.