Re: Effectiveness of compilers today

At SIGPLAN a couple of years ago (SIGPLAN '91, I think; the one in
Toronto), Guy Steele gave a talk on optimizing certain kinds of numerical
programs for the CM-5, called "Fortran at N Gigaflops" (or some such, for
suitable N). They generally got better speedups than are practical for
humans because they unrolled loops and did heavy and intricate register
allocation. A human could do it in theory, but it's so tedious and easy to
make a mistake that it's much better for a compiler to do it. Furthermore,
the compiler can generate many more useful object programs much faster
than the human can do them in assembly. So this is a case where the
compiler wins by brute force.
--
J. Eliot B. Moss, Associate Professor Visiting Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science School of Computer Science
Lederle Graduate Research Center Carnegie Mellon University
University of Massachusetts 5000 Forbes Avenue
Amherst, MA 01003 Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
(413) 545-4206, 545-1249 (fax) (412) 268-6767, 681-5739 (fax)
Moss@cs.umass.edu Moss@cs.cmu.edu
--

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