Re: Folk Theorem: Assemblers are superior to Compilers

Ralph Johnson (johnson@cs.uiuc.edu) wrote:
: Some people (I don't know if it was the same people or CMU grad students)
: wrote the same programs in Bliss given the same amount of time. There was
                                                                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
: some variance, of course, but by and large the Bliss programs were smaller.


This is part of the problem. Nobody says that the compiler isn't faster
for a given amount of development. The question implied that there was
interest in comparing whether or not an assembler was useful _at_all_, and
for sure it is. When an assembler programmer spends an extra _100_ hours
optimizing for the purpose of saving 10,000 users 10% of their run-time of
a program that is run 1 hour a day, his investment is paid back in time-
value to the community 1000% for _every_day_that_program_is_used_.
--

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