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Thank you. I was missing that info because I do not get that banner, currently surfing that site from the EU without any login.
Visiting the same URL on the .co.uk version gives me a multi-article scroller with different layout and links (including a "What is BBC Future?"), but no trace of that banner. Guessing that you're in the UK from your comment history, my best guess is that they decide whether to serve that banner via geofencing.
The subject does sometimes come up in my casual conversations, since Robin Milner was my first CS lecturer.
He never actually spoke about type inference in my presence. He did teach me CCS (pi-calculus predecessor) a couple of years later, by which time I could appreciate him.
I did some work for Apricot at their Glenrothes factory around 1985-87.
In my memory they went heavier on GEM than Windows. I never saw an Apricot running Windows prior to the PC-compatible models.
They switched focus to Windows around 1988, I believe - it was around the same time they started using the MCA bus (I believe they ended up as most successful non-IBM MCA vendor), so perhaps they had been convinced by the hype around Windows being a sort of interim OS/2?
Whatever the reason, the Qi-386 (and its ISA-based derivative Xen-i) was often combined with the Deskside Environment Pack, consisting of a trackball, infrared smartcard reader, and Win/386.
My dad's small publishing company had a bunch of them, running Aldus PageMaker and FreeHand. Lovely machines, and about half the price of the equivalent Mac IIs!
Matt Godbolt was saying recently that using tail-calls for an interpreter suits the branch predictor inside the cpu. Compared to a single big switch / computed jump.
I would have thought it actually helps the branch target predictor rather than the branch predictor. If you assume a simple predictor where the predicted target is just the last taken one then it's going to be wrong almost every time for a single switch. It will only be right for repeats of the exact same instruction.
If you have a separate switch at the end of each instruction then it will be right any time an instruction is followed by the same instruction as last time, which can probably happen quite a lot for short loops.
