Re: Assemblers can be fast

> "This [one-pass assembly with fixup chains] is easy if you
> don't have to worry about instructions that change their size
> depending on the expresison value (eg long, short and medium
> branch instructions). Many assemblers spend time optimizing
> such branches, and this generally requires an extra pass to do
> it properly. The gains of optimizing such branches are really
> worthwhile."


Branch length optimization is a win, but you don't need multiple passes
to do it. I recently wrote a one-pass assembler with various sorts of
span length optimization. There was nothing particularly clever
involved; I just told myself firmly that I wasn't going to do multiple
passes, and after some thought the necessary algorithms became clear.
It helped, but was not vital, that I had a large virtual memory space
and so didn't need to bother with temporary files.


In general, a good guiding principle is that it's much quicker to
review your generated object code in conjunction with in-memory tables
than it is to make another pass over the source code.


    -=- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew) [UUCP]
                                                (andrew%tekecs.tek.com@relay.cs.net) [ARPA]
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.