Assembly verses a high-level language.

        How come programs written in assembly are so much faster than any
other high-level language. I know that it is a low-level language and
that it "speaks" directly to the hardware so it is faster, but why
can't high-level languages compile programs just as fast as assembly
programs?
--
****************************************************************
# tomviper@ix.netcom.com #
[Depends on the machine, On Intel x86 chips, the internal architecture has
lots of peculiarities and warts that compilers don't deal with well. On the
other hand, on modern RISC chips C and Fortran compilers can often do better
than assembler programmers because they do a lot of tedious low-level
optimizations that humans don't have the patience for. -John]
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.