Re: Code quality

drw@zermelo.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:


>How important is generated code quality these days? There are a lot of
>good optimization techniques that seem to be adequate for ordinary
>programming. But they still are at least 10% or 20% worse than the ideal.
>Is there much of a market for another 10% in speed of generated code?


I think high-quality code generation is still important. However, people
aren't worried so much about the final 10%; rather, they are concerned
about the factors of 5 and 10 and 20 that current compilers lose to
(knowledgable and hardworking) humans when faced with an exotic
architecture. Typically, compilers still lose big on various kinds of
parallel machines and on machines with interesting memory hierachies. Of
course, most high-performance machines have many levels of parallelism and
a multi-level memory hierarchy, so... Lots of problems to work on!


Note that I'm not advocating hand coding for these machines. I believe
that even simple compilers are easily good enough to economically justify
their use in almost every circumstance. Instead, I'm saying that the
demands (and money) of high-performance users justify quite a lot more
research effort.


Preston Briggs
--

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