Re: Effectiveness of compilers today

> Could someone tell me more about this. Are there any tests between common
> compilers and assembler programmers. Who is the best?


Most of the posts in response to this question seem to look at it
(surprise) from the viewpoint of handcoding the same problem as that
presented to a compiler but IMO this is not at all representative because
assembler programmers in my experiance even think differently! Or as we
shall see do they?


I was recently party to a long discussion to do with this where it was
being discussed by predominately assembly programmers. A number of points
arose with perhaps one of the more common ones being stack usage where
compilers tend to but humans don't. Variable allocation tends to be
completely differently done and so on.


Looking at compiler produced code and having trouble improving it doesn't
surprise me because a human probably decided that was good code to produce
given the HL source.


Could an assembler programmer improve on an FFT library routine? I doubt
it. You see most of this compiler generated code is actually assembler
written on behalf of the compiler author(s). :-)


I expect there are some of the best assembly programmers of the lot here
in this group and they pass this knowledge on in the form of compilers.


All IMO.


    TC.
        E-mail: tchannon@black.demon.co.uk or tchannon@cix.compulink.co.uk
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