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Path: utzoo!decvax!ima!johnl
From: johnl@ima.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.compilers
Subject: Re: Assembly language programming preferable to HLL ???
Message-ID: <281@ima.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Dec-86 07:59:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ima.281
Posted: Fri Dec  5 07:59:43 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 8-Dec-86 04:06:35 EST
Reply-To: harvard!dartvax!uvm-gen!cavrak (Steve Cavrak)
Lines: 30
Approved: 
Apparently-To: uvm-gen!dartvax!decvax!ima!johnl

>     3. The assembly program will run 2-5 times faster.

>     3. As one of the compiler writers for NS , If assembler programs
> 	, as a rule , ran 2 times faster than our compiler, 
> 	I would be greatly surprized and FIX THE COMPILER !
					====================

Precisely.  What the CL author may have been reacting to, however, is
the very poor state of compilers on the market.  The latest BYTE magazine
has benchmarks on performance of several PC Pascal compilers.  Most are
so $%#@ing slow that it makes you cry.  And then Turbo makes the matter 
"worse" by proving that compilers don't have to be slow at all!

Maybe the availability of different compilers will get compiler writers
thinking about their art form better.

(And while you're at it, fix the linkers too!)
[I am going to wrap up this discussion unless somebody has something
particularly different to contribute.  It appears we all agree that A) micro
computer compilers are of generally poor quality, B) good compilers exist, which
produce code about as good as hand-coded, and C) the author of the CL article
was not well-informed about compilers outside the micro world.  Oh yes, and a
machine-independent assembler is an oxymoron, unless perhaps you consider a
language like C to be one.
-John]
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