From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,99ab4bb580fc34cd X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) Subject: Re: Q: access to subprogram Date: 1996/07/14 Message-ID: <4sbtc5$uej@news.nyu.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 168388984 references: <4s2tq3$fku@news.nyu.edu> organization: New York University Ultracomputer Research Lab newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-07-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article Ronald Cole writes: >You probably remember well the wailing and gnashing of teeth >from the CISC-owners when gcc went from version 1 (handled CISC >well/RISC not-so-well) to version 2 (handles RISC much better/CISC >not-as-well-as-version-1/holds "inbetween architectures" like the >Pentium in contempt). I remember no such thing since it never happened! GCC version 2 added new mechanisms to support RISC processors but had *absolutely no effect whatsoever* on CISC processors. None of the config files for CISC processors had to be changed, nor was there any change in the generated code for these machines. As to the Pentium issue, this is more complex and there were two factors. First, some of the optimizations required for the best-quality code on that CPU are both very unique to it and are very large pieces of code to add to the compiler. Secondly, the group that did add these, and other, Pentium-specific optimizations to GCC did such a bad job that it was not possible to fix their code without rewriting it and nobody wanted to do that without knowing which of the optimizations were the most important (otherwise, you'd risk spending a lot of work on complex optimizations that had a small effect). By the time this was done, the P6 became available. It does not benefit from most of the Pentium-specific optimizations (which I knew a while before it came out), so the issue rapidly became moot.