Re: fledgling assembler programmer

gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> schrieb:


[...]


> Well, to be sure that this is about compilers, my favorite complaint
> is the lost art of small memory compilers. That is, ones that can
> run in kilobytes instead of megabytes.


On the Internet, there is a project for almost everything - in this
case Tiny C, which still seems to be under active development. Or
at least there are sill commits at https://repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git .


However, there is a reason why compilers got so big - there is
always a balance to be struck between comilation speed, compiler
size and optimization.


An extreme example: According to "Abstracting Away the Machine", the
very first FORTRAN compiler was so slow that the size of programs
it could compile was limited by the MTBF of the IBM 704 of around
eight hours.


The balance has shifted over time, because of increasing computing
power and available memory that can be applied to compilation,
and because relatively more people use programs than use compilers
than ever before. So, in today's environment, there is little
incentive for writing small compilers.


Also, languages have become bigger, more expressive, more powerful,
more bloated (take your pick), which also increases the size
of compilers.

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