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Subject: Re: ot. is the gcc 3.3 compiler just as fast as microsoft's now?? nt.

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 13:59:09 08/06/03

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On August 05, 2003 at 14:27:03, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>(1) Some ancient decisions were made in gcc design when VAX and mc68k were
>primary gcc targets; the worst one is poor memory disambiguation. Now that
>decisions hurt optimizations a lot, especially on CPUs with large number of
>registers, but fixing those decisions require *highly coordinated* rewrite of
>lot of code for lot of targets.

I don't want to doubt, what you say. But for earlier versions of gcc, I made
some other observations. For identical functions, where it produced seemingly
good machine code on Alpha, gcc produced onx x86 stupid code like

 mov reg, some_memory_on_stack
 ; nothing in between
 mov some_memory_on_stack, reg

Perhaps I should mention, that it is an integer reg (for floating point, one
could see reasons). Some functions were full of such things. I reported it to
Gcc-maintainers. "Sorry, no time to look into that", "It's because x86 has too
few registers" (paraphrasing answers I got).

So, it gave me the impression, that when Gcc runs out of registers, it started
to produce such things.

Regards,
Dieter




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