To pacify the end-of-month bug, here is another placeholder#

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 13:41:52 +0000

To pacify the end-of-month bug, here is another placeholder. Without going into any particularly interesting details, this one says that

• There's enough of a mess in the SBCL AMD64 backend regarding floating point (mostly to do with object sizes and alignment) that it'd be quicker and more reliable to actually go over it carefully and check it all at once instead of fixing bugs as they happen. That being so, this would be a great opportunity to rewrite it to use XMM registers and the "128 bit media instructions" instead of the x87. AMD claims that they run faster,there are 16 random-access registers instead of the slightly weird x87 stack thing, and it has perfectly normal IEEE single and double precision (none of this 80 bit nonsense) so we might even get less freaky results too.

• I've decided to enter the London Inline Marathon in September, so am now skating to work three days a week (or so; depends on weather etc). There was a tube (metro train system) strike here in London yesterday; so I ended up skating to work, across town to the Londonskate (a and less confusingly k.a the Wednesday Night Skate), did the skate itself, and then, finding that the tube was still closed after the pub shut, skated back across town to Liverpool St station from where I got a surface rail train to Stratford (the one in East London, not the one where Shakespeare lived) and skated home from there. Probably around 20-22 miles in all, I guess, and must admit that today I am just a little tired.