Messages in this thread | | | From | "David Schwartz" <> | Subject | RE: time_t size: The year 2038 bug? | Date | Thu, 6 Jan 2000 14:39:14 -0800 |
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Peter Svensson wrote:
> By 2038 you will most likely still find lots of systems being manefactured > with 4, 8 and 16 bit processors as well as 32-bit ones. > "If you underpower it - the programmers will probably get it to > run anyway"
That's the attitude that needs to go away.
Underpowered hardware forces 'clever' coding which is more likely to have bugs than straightforward coding. Such code tends to break as it is maintained and tends to be less reliable than code that was designed on appropriate hardware.
There's been a major move in programming away from 'clever' optimization and towards writing clean, clear code that is easy to maintain. The goals tend to have mutually-exclusive aspects.
If you're going to argue that software should be designed to make hardware become obsolete less quicky, you're going to find that this is a two-way street. If you want your hardware to last until and past 2038, you're going to have to make sure that it's adequate not just for what your programmers can cram into it today, but also for what people will want it to do 30 years from now.
Design obsolesence into the hardware and then blame it on the software. Wonderful. IMO, anything we can do to make this technique work better is ultimately self-destructive. If you design in just the hardware that the software needs today, your embedded system should break.
DS
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