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I made my own DOS implementation (Announce)

posted by samwdpckr, 28.03.2024, 04:15

Nowadays many developers want to drop support of CPUs that don't have SSE2 instructions, and they are basically using those new instruction set extensions as a tool to bully people who have an "old" computer that still has more than enough computing power for their use. They are reasoning it by saying that the new instruction set extensions make the program run faster, when the reality is that every new version of the program is always more bloated than the previous one. This culture is especially visible amongst the Rust gang and the developers of many graphical desktop libraries in the FOSS world.

They are purposely writing code that breaks when sizeof(long) is not 64, and are writing makefiles that override the CFLAGS that the user has set, resulting in a binary that has a different CPU target than was intended by the user. This type of behaviour is unacceptable. When the program has zero lines of assembly, there is absolutely no reason to artificially limit its portability by preventing building it to certain CPU targets.

And my example shows that using those new instruction set extensions like MMX and SSE2 does not always even make the code faster. SSE2 can do 64-bit math natively, so there is less code involved in adding 64-bit numbers, and it should be faster in theory, but not always in practice. The user must always have the option to build and optimize the code for their own computer, even when the computer is "old" or something else than intended by the original developer of the software.

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