Author: Danniel Corbit
Date: 09:00:20 09/29/98
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On September 29, 1998 at 08:04:28, Robert Hyatt wrote: [snip] >It depends on how you define "better"... Note that Crafty is pure C now >because of the portability issue and the time issue. I'd love to write the >fastest code I could in asm, but the target platform changes about once every >2-3 years, while we had many man-years (Harry and I) in the assembly code for >Cray Blitz. That's one of the focal points of the problem. CPU's change over time, even within the same family. What is fast for a CPU may not be fast for its next generation. Also, the volume of code is a problem. An age old adage is still true: A good programmer produces tens of lines of debugged code per hour. [This takes into account design, meetings, debugging, beta test and all of that]. The *volume* of assembly language is much higher than that of C or other higher level languages. That makes it slower to write. On the other hand, if you can identify a hot spot, it is fairly simple to recode that small portion in Assembly language. One approach that I often use is to use the compiler to generate assembly language for a C function. Then I look over what the compiler did carefully and make changes where they are warranted. This method also creates all the interface setup for you and saves a bit of time that way. I'm actually pretty surprised how even-handed crafty is. I have run it through a profiler several times, and I can't really see any places that are enormous bottle-necks. [snip]
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