Re: Folk Theorem: Assemblers are superior to Compilers

elliottm@csulb.edu (Mike Elliott) writes:


> [I believe that there are compilers which can outdo human coders, but
> I'd be hard-pressed to believe that any of them generate code for the
> 8086. In my personal experience, rewriting C into assembler on an 8086
> gets notably smaller code because humans are better than compilers at
> figuring out what to do with the very irregular '86 register set. -John]


OK, for the x86 line this might be hard, but if you really want to see a
compiler jump through hoops you can't imagine, look at the output of a
BLISS compilation on one of the VMS microfiches - I've done a lot of
MACRO-32 assembler programming, but this compiler beats me hands off at
inventing tricky code sequences.
--
Toon Moene (toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl)
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[I can easily believe it for the Vax, which has nearly uniform registers
and very uniform addressing. The '86 has neither, making it hard to apply
many of the whizzo new optimization techniques. -John]
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