Re: optimizing compiler against iaverage assembly programmer.

Greg Miller <gmiller@iswt.com> writes:
>Well, I've never seen a compiler that was better than a typical
>assembly coder, but the truth is that the costs of coding in assembly
>don't pay for the benefits. Hand-coded assembly tends to be a little
>faster, but not enough to make it worth the effort.


Except in embedded fixed-point digital signal processing applications,
where the difference in both speed and code size are still a factor of
four or so. In a high-volume application, no one can afford to use
four times the ROM and four times the processor speed.


For this reason, there's still a lot of hand-written assembly language
being produced: an internal study done a few years back at a large
telecom company reported that fully 1/3 of engineering person-hours
were being spent on writing it. The 90/10 rule will permit using a
HLL in most places other than critical inner loops to meet time
constraints, but memory size constraints mean that code bloat is a
problem for all code.
--
-- Joe Buck http://www.synopsys.com/pubs/research/people/jbuck.html
--

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