Re: Assemblers can be fast

In article <813@ima.ISC.COM> Green Eric Lee <ihnp4!usl!usl-pc!jpdres10> writes:
>Still, on the great assembly-language vs. direct-to-object debate, I
>still must conclude that emitting assembly language slows things down
>a lot. This is especially true on microcomputers, with their slow disk
>drives, which is why most microcomputer compilers directly emit object
>files.


One solution that I have worked on is to emit a hybrid assembler / object
file. For instance if the assember source was to be


mov d7,-(a7)


then the object for this can be generated by the compiler as a 16 bit word,
whereas for something like


bcc L42


the compiler emits the assembler as shown.


Now you have the advantage of assembler / HLL mixing, and IF you want to
mess with the assembler, a separate translator will convert from the
hybrid language to full assembly in a twinkle; however you still keep the
advantage of much less disk I/O: the 'mov' above is 14 bytes, against the
2 bytes for the assembled output - this probably means about a 60% saving
in file being processed.
--
dg@wrs.UUCP - David Goodenough
--

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