Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation?

"Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de>
23 Aug 2002 11:02:29 -0400

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Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? joachim_d@gmx.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2002-08-04)
Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? ceco@jupiter.com (Tzvetan Mikov) (2002-08-10)
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Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? marcov@toad.stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) (2002-08-14)
Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? joachim_d@gmx.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2002-08-23)
Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? ceco@jupiter.com (Tzvetan Mikov) (2002-08-23)
Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? marcov@toad.stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) (2002-08-24)
Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation? marcov@toad.stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) (2002-08-24)
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From: "Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 23 Aug 2002 11:02:29 -0400
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 02-07-098 02-07-121 02-07-128 02-08-005 02-08-024 02-08-054
Keywords: performance
Posted-Date: 23 Aug 2002 11:02:29 EDT

Marco van de Voort wrote:
> Tzvetan Mikov wrote:
>>I got pretty angry when I saw things like:
>> mov eax, ebx
>> mov ebx, eax
>>in the "optimized" code.
>
> But how did the overal performance differ? Everybody can single out some
> thing that was missed by the peephole optimiser (and maybe only because the
> construct just before or after it was "special"), but the overall code
> quality matters, and can (IMHO) be only done by benchmarking/profiling real
> applications.


I haven't done any benchmarks, but code like the above was scattered
all over the place. About 20% of instructions were such store/reload
pairs, at least for the code that I looked at. I found this appalling.


I once wrote a text editor in TP. I wrote a few lines of inline
assembly to access the single characters on a line and got an overall
speedup of one order of magnitude, both with and without array bounds
checking. The TP code couldn't handle more than about 2 keystrokes per
second, assembly was barely acceptable with bounds checking and
satisfactory without.


Again, this is all written from a years-old perspective. I have used
Borland Pascal, but I never encountered any serious performance
problems with Borland products afterwards (I don't know whether that's
because the code generators improved or whether processors got
faster).


Regards,
Joachim


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