Re: High Level Language vs Assembly

I think to discard ASM entirely is foolish as it does have it's uses,
certainly it is not sensible to write a large project in ASM or even a
small one, but careful use of ASM can give considerable performance
benefits.


For example I not so long ago wrote a real-time 3D graphics engine
from a 2D platform, I quickly found I couldn't get all the performance
I wanted using C alone and I knew I was using the best (known)
algorithms. When I dropped the inner loop of the rasterizer into ASM
and carefully hand optimized it I found I got a performance increase
of around 120%. I think the key was I was only trying to hand-code
less than 10 lines of C in a loop the CPU was in 95% of the time.


But certainly always look for the algorithm improvement first if it's
still not fast enough then think about using assembler.


Tom Shackell

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.