Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Mon, 03 Mar 2025 16:44:17 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

MarkC <usenet@em-ess-see-twenty-seven.me.uk> writes:

NetBSD still has a VAX port, so the sizes of pre-built packages from
there might be informative.

 
Thanks.  The NetBSD pkgsrc is not limited to NetBSD, and there is a wide
variety of prebuilt stuff there.  I took those that sound like
architecture names (and probably belong to NetBSD): aarch64 alpha amd64
earmv7hf i386 m68k mips64eb mipsel powerpc sparc sparc64 vax
 
Unfortunately, they do not seem to port to RISC-V in any form yet, and
their earmv7hf port uses ARM A32, not T32.  So the NetBSD competition is
performed without entries for those two instruction set encodings that
showed the smallest code sizes on Debian.  Anyway, here are the results:

You could compare sizes of applications in the base.tgz tarball for each
architecture, this is available for RISC-V as well as all the others.