
Qua: Alexia Massalin interview (1996) - tjalfi
https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffmassalin/
======
monocasa
If this interests you, you should give her phd thesis a read. Easily one of
the craziest kernels out there; a 1980s optimizing JIT kernel that goes to
crazy lengths even when viewed against today.

[http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/index.html](http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/index.html)

~~~
johnm
Here's a PDF version:
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.4...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.4871)

------
cosmojg
Oh my God, the end of the article is absolute _gold_! What a lovely tradition.
I'm going to start offering piggyback rides to everyone I meet. Here's an
excerpt of Alexia's experiences offering piggyback rides to various notable
people:

> The Mighty Piggybacker

 _Marvin Minsky_ Lofty pioneer in artificial intelligence. "Great view! I
could almost touch the bottoms of the traffic lights!"

__Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie __Creators of Unix. "I looked up to them as
an undergrad at Cooper Union. Who would have imagined I'd actually get to meet
them, let alone offer piggybacks! And afterward I got to fly with Ken in his
plane!"

 _Zvi Galil_ Dean, School of Engineering, Columbia University. "Very fit. Jogs
umpteen miles a day. Carries well."

__Penn & Teller __Comedians. "I carried Teller. But Penn (the big one) could
not be persuaded that his weight was not an issue."

 _Calton Pu_ Massalin's PhD adviser. "Excellent piggybacks. Carried me 30 city
blocks once! That's my longest piggyback ever from a single person."

__Neil Reynolds __Fellow grad student at Columbia. "At 6' 6", 350-plus pounds,
the heaviest person I've carried. His rides are spectacular. He hardly notices
it when I jump on."

__Renate Valencia __Massalin's girlfriend. "Much more than piggyback rides:
also in-her-arms carries, over-her-shoulder carries, assorted spins and
tosses. She can grab me by my armpits and twirl me round in the air!"

__Mort Meyerson __CEO, Perot Systems. "Not only accepted my offer, but did so
with much enthusiasm. Restored my faith in humanity."

 _Richard Stallman_ Founder of the Free Software Foundation. "Impolite shrug;
I did not even finish offering the piggyback when it became clear that further
conversation would not have been appreciated."

__Douglas Adams __Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
"Unceremoniously ignored an offer of a piggyback, as if I was crazy or
something :-)"

__Nicholas Negroponte __Director of the MIT Media Lab. "Very politely declined
several offers."

------
joelkevinjones
Many years ago, I was in a group at Apple that interviewed Massalin. It was
decided not to hire, as, while brilliant, there would be a net drop in
productivity, as we would all spend too much time discussing the latest
oddity. As one might expect, there was a stuffed koala toy on the table during
Massalin's job talk. Brilliant work on the super-optimizer.

~~~
aeontech
That seems like a really sad reason for no-hire.

It’s hard not to think that the diversity of thought and personality would
have been a net positive.

Though I suppose it all depends on the other team personalities as well.

------
aeontech
On John Regehr’s blog there was some interesting musings about the Synthesis
kernel ideas in 2019 [0], discussed on HN at the time here [1].

[0]:
[https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1676](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1676)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20337231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20337231)

------
renox
> Then Massalin discovered that he could turn it around and use the
> superoptimizer to discover and design better machine languages.

Any reference on this?

~~~
EdwardCoffin
[https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse501/15sp/papers...](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse501/15sp/papers/massalin.pdf)

~~~
renox
Thanks, I'm not so sure that superoptimizers have been used to design ISA, it
seems more like "what could I do with this tool?".

~~~
EdwardCoffin
I suspect it was a misinterpretation on the part of the interviewer. If you
make the (to a nontechnical writer) minor rephrasing of "design better machine
languages" as "write better machine language" you get something better
describing what the superoptimizer helps one do.

~~~
tjalfi
I think the interviewer interpreted Massalin’s comment correctly.

She was (is?) involved in the design of the MicroUnity ISA.

You can find her name on quite a few of their patents.

She also posted to comp.compilers[0] about an improved version of the
superoptimizer.

Their product was targeted at media codecs and signal processing so it would
be natural to use a superoptimizer to identify whether an instruction was
worth including in the ISA.

AFAIK MicroUnity never shipped a product but filed a lot of early patents on
SIMD. They sued a number of tech companies for patent infringement so they may
still exist.

[0]
[https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/97-07-088](https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/97-07-088)

