14 Nov
2003
14 Nov
'03
10:44 a.m.
On Nov 14, 16:48, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
I know the IRIX C compiler can do global
optimizations but that
takes
quite a bit of time and processing power; I never
bothered with it
when I
was programming under IRIX. And this was at least 10
years ago so
it's
margially on topic here 8-P
Maybe you should have. About 1996, I did a project during which (as a
side-effect) I spent a while looking at compiler output, and comparing
gcc to IRIX cc. In all the cases I tried, cc took about the same time
to compile as gcc, but produced faster (and often smaller) code.
That's not too surprising, really. For one thing, cc used a bigger
optimisation window. For another, it's written by a bunch of people
who are very close to the processor it's written for, and they didn't
have to worry about whether anything would work with some other
architecture; they could (and did) do extensive re-ordering of
instructions.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York