Re: Is There Still a Need for "Turbo" Compilers?

Jon Forrest wrote:
> Those of us who have been around a while still remember the miracle of
> Borland's "Turbo" languages. They were so much faster than anything
> else available at the time that they made the compile/link step take a
> negligible amount of time. Given how slow I/O was in those days, this
> was a very welcome development.
>
> Turbo languages sacrifice code optimization for quick build time, and
> are more suited for development and debug stages that final code
> production. They also avoid I/O by keeping the output of compiler
> stages in memory.
>
> However, these days there aren't any "Turbo" language implementations
> that I'm aware of.


The lcc-win compiler is one of the fastest compilers under the windows
system (linux/AIX versions exist too).


It is fast because it keeps everything in memory, without building any
intermediate files.


Compared to gcc the compilation speed ratio is 1:6 or 1:10, it
depends.


> Is this because modern hardware is so fast that it isn't worth
> developing compilers and linkers optimized for speed?


No. It is because compilers and languages are becoming so BLOATED that
they loose all perspective from their user's needs.


> By using proper command line arguments to gcc, can you get
> quasi-Turbo performance compared to using arguments that result in
> highly-optimized code?




"quasi Turbo" is an exaggeration here. That compiler is one
of the slowest compilers in existence.


> John Ousterhout, the inventor of Tcl/Tk, is the founder of a company
> that produces software that optimizes parallelizing of the commands in
> makefiles, which is one way to speed up the building of large software
> packages. But, this doesn't do anything to the compilers themselves.
>
> But, how fast could a compiler be given today's vast amount of virtual
> memory and multiple-core CPUs?


Download lcc-win from the link below and see how fast it is.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32


--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32

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