Re: Code quality

drw@zermelo.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
> Is there much of a market for another 10% in speed of generated code?


For a number of years I have been doing consulting work for the compiler
department of a large company that manufactures office-scale Unix systems
with bundled compilers. Run time performance of the compiled code is
*all* they care about. Their marketing people say that the price they can
get for a system directly depends on the SPEC rating the system can
attain. They literally have a formula that they use to calculate the
system price from the SPEC rating. Furthermore, for every additional 1%
of object code speed improvement that we might squeeze out of the
compiler, the marketing people can estimate how many additional millions
of dollars of revenue the product will produce for the company.


On the other hand, they couldn't care less about speed of compilation.
This is a complete reversal of the attitude that prevailed there a few
years ago.
--
John Polstra polstra!jdp@uunet.uu.net
John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. ...!uunet!polstra!jdp
Seattle, Washington USA Phone (206) 932-6482, FAX (206) 935-1262
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