Re: Optimizing in assembly language

I wrote:


> It's not such a wild-assed thought.


And our esteemed moderator added:


> [Quite a while ago I read a paper about a Bell Labs language called LIL
> that was intended as a level between C and assembler. They eventually
> declared it a failure because in every case where they thought it would
> be useful, it turned out to be easier overall to make their C compiler
> emit better code and write in C. -John]


Absolutely. No argument in 99% of the cases.


The only place where it makes sense to do this is if you have to write
snippets of code that either does not fit into a standard C model
(usually interleaving assembly inside regular C code), or touches
registers or other resources that fall outside the usual "registers and
memory" model, *AND* and you want to be able to do at least some
instruction rearranging around or even through the assembly code.


This becomes even more important if, for the convenience of your
programmers, you provide macros that do standard things in a convenient
fashion (e.g. DSP blocks), and you don't want to go around adding
high-level built-ins for each of those building blocks..


--
Shankar Unni sunni@speakeasy.net

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