Re: Continuations

On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 11:16:45 -0400, EricP wrote:

We were playing with an IBM R6000 around 1990 which was supposed to
be this fast risc machine but we found it ran slower than our VAX.
We disassembled the code and found out that instead of a normal
decrement/increment stack it used a linked list of heap allocated
objects. Every call did a malloc and every return did a free. All the
hardware speed improvement had been squandered on this completely
unnecessary ABI overhead.

Was that the RS/6000? That was quite a step forward at the time (and for
some years after), even among all the other new RISC-based architectures
appearing around that time.

What OS/software were you trying above? Because it doesn’t sound like
regular C code on a Unix-type system.