Is There Still a Need for "Turbo" Compilers?

Those of us who have been around a while still remember the miracle of
Borland's "Turbo" languages. They were so much faster than anything
else available at the time that they made the compile/link step take a
negligible amount of time. Given how slow I/O was in those days, this
was a very welcome development.


Turbo languages sacrifice code optimization for quick build time, and
are more suited for development and debug stages that final code
production. They also avoid I/O by keeping the output of compiler
stages in memory.


However, these days there aren't any "Turbo" language implementations
that I'm aware of. Is this because modern hardware is so fast that it
isn't worth developing compilers and linkers optimized for speed? By
using proper command line arguments to gcc, can you get quasi-Turbo
performance compared to using arguments that result in
highly-optimized code?


John Ousterhout, the inventor of Tcl/Tk, is the founder of a company
that produces software that optimizes parallelizing of the commands in
makefiles, which is one way to speed up the building of large software
packages. But, this doesn't do anything to the compilers themselves.


But, how fast could a compiler be given today's vast amount of virtual
memory and multiple-core CPUs?


Cordially,
--
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest@berkeley.edu

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