Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!munnari!ditmela!latcs1!vertical!greg From: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: The VAX Always Uses Fewer Instructions Message-ID: <140@vertical.oz> Date: 5 Jul 88 01:36:33 GMT References: <6921@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <28200161@urbsdc> <10595@sol.ARPA> <270@laic.UUCP> <20424@beta.lanl.gov> <810@garth.UUCP> Reply-To: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond) Organization: Vertical Software, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 15 In article <810@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes: >>As you pointed out, there is a need for optimizing assemblers. >Strong disagreement--an assembler should be safe, simple, and dumb. If you >want an optimiser, use a compiler. >What is preferable is separate layer to do the optimisation. The problem with In fact, use the "optimisation" pass from your favourite C compiler. This is tough to organise on most Unix boxes, but goes great on the 8086 X-compiler we have here. The optimiser is a separate assembler-assembler processor. I can't see where its orientation as a C optimiser would kill semantics of assembler code. But then, it may not be a real clever optimiser either (for the general case). -- Gregory Bond, Vertical Software, Melbourne (greg@vertical.oz) I used to be a pessimist. Now I am a realist.