Effectiveness of compilers

ANDREAS ARFF (andreasa@dhhalden.no) wrote:
: Could someone tell me more about this. Are there any tests between common
: compilers and assembler programmers. Who is the best?


In my experience with "simple" chips (68K, pdp11) there are three
important cases:


Human "tweaks" assembly code output from compiler. This tends to
improve (or worsen) by the oft-quoted 10%.


Human attempts to hand-compile significant piece of code directly
from HLL. This sometimes gets a gain of 2x, but can also be a disaster, as
human error takes its toll. On simpler chips, sufficient rigor can usually
make it work, but I wouldn't even attempt it on something like the i860.


Human re-thinks algorithm in terms not constrained by the HLL.
This is where impressive gains can be made. My personal best data point is
an eight-fold improvement in a data-decompression routine. This was
measured against the "tweaked" output of a C compiler, and
accepted/produced the same data format dictated by the C version, so
correctness was relatively easy to determine. Implementing the same
algorithm in C was slower than the original, as it involved bit-pointers,
rotates, and co-routining. This is not to say that I was using any
particular feature of the specific chip (68k), but rather the sort of
operations that are common to a lot of chips, but difficult to express in
C. No, Herman, you don't need to add to this :-)


The major problem with the perennial flame war is that it seems to
end up being cast as a battle between a _particular_ HLL (usually C, on
UseNet) and the grubbiest sort of "speed at any price" bit-twiddling. I
almost never code in octal, but rely on an "industrial strength" macro-
assembler and, when needed, write special-purpose programs to generate the
"assembly" code. Yes, sometimes I write directly in assembly, but only the
expectation that the code I write will go into a _lot_ of ROMS, or dire
need (Trap handlers come to mind) is sufficient to get me to do much of
that sort of thing...


Of course, _sometimes_ I write in assembly for _fun_ :-)


Mike


| Mike Albaugh (albaugh@agames.com || netcom.com!agames.com!albaugh)
| Atari Games Corp (Arcade Games, no relation to the makers of the ST)
| 675 Sycamore Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035 voice: (408)434-1709
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