Re: Compiler for Z80/6510

["Vladimir Olensky" <vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote in message <81nmkf$dvp$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article <s3ti5n1a4r24@corp.supernews.com>,
>  "Vladimir Olensky" <vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> These IA32 SIMD extensions ...
>
>Well I doubt there are many Ada programs which would be
>affected here, these instructions are unlikely to be very
>useful in the context of general purpose Ada code.
[...]
>This is certainly not one of the most important targets
>of opportunity for improving the quality of GNAT code on
>the ia32 :-)

Hmm, you mean that general purpose Ada does not require
ability to efficiently process data which length is more than some
small amount of bytes and if someone wants efficiency in this
area than one  should use Assembler or Intel C instead ?-)
Efficient data processing is not in the domain of general
purpose Ada programming ???
Or no one wants efficient data processing on IA32 platform ???
That's very interesting point of view :-)
Just consider data encryption and decryption which is
becoming more and more important. There are a lot of other
general purpose things that require efficient data processing.

> I believe that GCC 3.0 will make some attempt to use these
>instructions,

Probably it will happen at some time.

Here is a  quote from GCC page:
" The PentiumGCC (short PGCC) is an extension of GCC
specifically aimed at the newer Intel chips and their clones (Pentium,
PPro, Pentium-II and the Cyrix6x86 and AMD-K6+ chips). The current
goal is to enhance GCC to a point where it generates code as fast as
PGCC, but until that work is finished PGCC is still maintained, and often
achieves substantial speed improvements over GCC"

> but my guess is that most Ada programs will not
> notice the difference.

If GNAT won't use that improvements :-)

>Actually I think most programs will see FAR more gain from the
>general improvement in ia32 code that has come from rewriting
>the ia32 config file.


Here I agree that general improvement in ia32 code  is  very
important from all points of view and it is always very welcomed.

There still exist some silly pieces of code generated by the
compiler that is not possible to improve with any of the existing
optimization options.

In other thread  Robert C. Leif  did a very good comparison
with the chess game  ( I always thought the same :-).

When compiler will be able to analyze ahead  more than one or two
movements of the player (programmer)  than situation would be
much better.
May be compiler implementators should ask Garry Kasparov to
help them  ? -)