Re: [Tinycc-devel] (no subject)

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 11 September 2006 6:20 pm, Dave Dodge wrote:
> On the other hand you have platforms like IA-64, where in theory a
> good compiler can get much better results than a bad compiler no
> matter how good the incoming code is.  This sort of architecture
> requires the compiler to explicitly reorder, bundle, group, and
> schedule instructions ahead of time to hit the functional units on the
> chip in the best way.  I think compiler design for IA-64 is an active
> research area at several universities.

Translation: Itanic sucks so badly that it takes a near-miraculous compiler to 
get even reasonable performance out of it, although we try to phrase it to 
seem like it's the compiler's fault.

I wouldn't consider the second coming of the i432 to be TCC's problem.  I do 
not buy the "our chip design's great, it's just that every C compiler 
produced over the last 30 years sucks" argument.  There's plenty of hardware 
out there that can get better performance out of fewer transistors, fewer 
watts, and without requiring an NP-complete (or AI-complete) optimizer to 
hide its most obvious shortcomings.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.