Re: performance-oriented languages?

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, John Max Skaller wrote:


> On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 01:19:37 -0400, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
> > Can anyone comment on what languages or compilers have 'performance'
> > as the primary goal of the project?
> > An example might be Mlton, the whole program SML optimizing compiler.
> > http://www.mlton.org/ I think Intel C++ would count. VC++ wouldn't,
> > it's oriented towards the IDE for .NET stuff, not best possible
> > performance. I don't think g++ would count, as given its results in
> > recent years it doesn't seem to be a performance-oriented project.
>
> As far as I can tell, g++ at least emits fairly reasonable code out of
> the back end. It has much more problem with higher level
> optimisations. That problem will never go away -- you can't write a
> good compiler for an extremely complex and nasty language in an
> language like C, so grossly unsuited to writing compilers.


What an incredibly strange thing to say, when one of the most optimizing
compilers out there (Intel's), is written in C.
I do agree that it's not necessarily the nicest language in the world to
work with when trying to write high level optimizations, but claiming you
can't write a good compiler in it is squarely contradicted by the fact
that Intel did and does it.


The upcoming GCC 4.0 has a whole suite of high level optimizations, all
written in C (though in a lot of ways, it's more of a infrastructure
release than a performance one, as we are still tuning pass ordering on
the new tree level SSA based optimization passes, etc).


If there was a compelling reason to switch to C++, GCC would do it. There
just hasn't been one so far. There are rumblings of some things that may
become compelling reasons in the future (at least a year or two down the
road, minimum).
We'll see.


--Dan

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