Re: Does ObjectAda optimize at all??

[dennison@telepath.com]

In article <dewar.903282165@merv>,
  dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
> In my experience, programmers often do not know enough to know whether
> such manual optimizations help or hurt. They often end up not only
> trashing the code, but also making it run nmore slowly. For example,
> it takes a careful analysis of icache usage to know whether loop
> unrolling is helpful.

Exactly. I think I'm familiar enough with my own ignorance to aviod this
personally. But its awfully hard to stop other folks from doing this in their
own code when they know:

  o  The code in question is called several times from a high-frequency
routine  o  The complier is unable to do the optimization for them.  o	If
they manually "optimize" the code later, they are liable to  accidentally
introduce new bugs (at a very late stage in development).

Thus I think it vital that developers have some knowledge of and faith in the
optimization abilities of their compiler. If a compiler doesn't do much in the
way of optimization, it clearly falls down in this respect.

T.E.D.

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp   Create Your Own Free Member Forum