Re: HLL syntax & structure suited to rapid compilation?

"Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de> wrote in message
> I'm under the impression that compilers spend most of their time with
> optimization. TP did constant expression evaluation and dead code
> elimination, but that's about all: no liveness analysis, no register
> allocation. The resultant machine code was horrendous (but nobody
> noticed or cared, even in the 16 MHz age - so much for the relevance
> of efficiency).
>
> That's Turbo Pascal. I never got around to looking at Borland Pascal
> output - I sincerely hope things have improved.


They have, but not as much as one would hope (or expect, given how much time
has passed). All 32-bit versions of Borland Pascal/Delphi use Borland C's
backend which performs some of the standard optimizations. Unfortunately the
last time I looked (Borland C++ 5.5, 2000) it was still pretty horrible
compared to GCC or VC (not to mention Intel). I used to be a long time
Borland fan but I got pretty angry when I saw things like:
      mov eax, ebx
      mov ebx, eax
in the "optimized" code.


-tzvetan

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