268 karma · joined August 18, 2014
P4 was a great idea, but there's not much hardware that supports it.
fd.io / vpp is an impressive stack for software-only routing. Like all SW-only solutions, it suffers from high power consumption and packet rate variability. At today's packet rates, you always have to ask 'how many CPU instructions / cycles are required to perform this or that function per packet'.
Someone in the 1920s/30s would call the ability to solve equations or play chess well as signs of high intelligence. Not so long ago, translation of natural languages was considered a task requiring a good level of intelligence.
Each progress in AI changes the definition of intelligence as we realize that a machine finally able to do task X is not really as intelligent as we thought it had to be.
And today the AI/robotics industry struggles to build a machine that can perform the job of a room cleaner. Beating grand masters at chess was far easier.
RPC is something of a red flag as well. RPCs will never behave like local procedure calls, so the abstraction will always leak (the pendulum of popularity keeps swinging back and forth between RPC and special purpose protocols every few years, though).
Given all its restrictions, I doubt something complex like a graphics driver would be possible. But then, I know nothing about graphics driver programming.
Back in the late 1990s, we moved from Motorola 68k / sbus to Power/PCI. To make the transition easy, we kept using big endian for the CPU. However, all available networking chips only supported PCI / little endian at this point. For DMA descriptor addresses and chip registers, one had to remember to use little endian.
No disagreement about Perl's ugliness..
No parsing of text. No escaping of '+++' to avoid that a '+++ATH' in the data stream closes the connection (I wonder how the download time of a file containing only '+' differs from a file with other characters).
And with increasing mobile network speeds, you really want something like DMA instead of reading individual bytes from a serial interface.
It is astounding that the 3g/4g modem industry did not come up with a better way to talk to their devices. Even ISDN had a widely implemented proper API.
More seriously, this is a very good comparison. IBM always dreamed to be something like AWS is today.
ATM-based DSL was a compromise of the different factions inside telcos. The 'net heads' got a fast Internet access technology. The 'Bell heads' got ATM into every home in preparation of all the glorious ATM applications that would be available any moment now.