Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Why not a Rebel for those who like a decent OS?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 11:30:04 01/22/02

Go up one level in this thread


On January 22, 2002 at 05:55:42, Kim Roper Jensen wrote:

>On January 22, 2002 at 02:44:19, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>On January 22, 2002 at 02:32:03, David Rasmussen wrote:
>>
>>>On January 22, 2002 at 00:59:21, James Doby  wrote:
>>>
>>>>Ok if rebel doesn't Run on Windows XP, is their any disadvantage to installing
>>>>windows98 along with windows XP? Is this Possible? I can't see myself giving up
>>>>my favorite program just to upgrade to XP
>>>
>>>?
>>
>>It will be here before long, I am sure.  I believe that it is one of Ed's top
>>priorities.
>>
>>It won't be at all easy, since Rebel is written largely in assembly language.
>
>I could be wrong but didnt Ed say that he had the engine in C and then compiled
>to get the asm file AND then optimized THAT code ????? Then it could be a
>question about how much speed hes willing to sacrifice to make it windows
>compatible
>
>I think it was in some earlier post, regarding the asm optmization debate

I think he was talking about a general technique that many of us lazy sods use.
We take some C code, and compile it with optimization set to the hilt, and
generate assembly from that.  Then, we can look over the assembly and figure out
stuff that the compiler could not assume.  Mabye here or there we can make some
small improvement.

At any rate, assembly code is very low level.  If you take some simple snippet
of C code and compile it to assembly language, you might transform 100 lines
into 1000 (depending on what it is doing).  Now, suppose you have some code base
with one hundred thousand lines of assembly.  It's going to take you quite a
while to transform it.

Once you do the transformation to assembly language, we are assuming that you do
that to tweak it.  From that point forward, the C code serves no purpose except
as a primitive documentation about how the algorithm used to work.  All future
modifications will be to the assembly language and not the C code.

Lotus 1-2-3 was originally written in assembly and they went through a big
trauma to translate the whole pile into C.  I think the big lag that they
suffered is what allowed Microsoft Excell to catch up (and pass) them.



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.