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From: bart <bc@freeuk.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 11:30:19 +0100
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On 17/06/2024 07:22, James Kuyper wrote:
> On 6/13/24 10:43, Michael S wrote:
>> On Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:53:54 +0200
>> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
> ...
>>> I know more than most C programmers about how certain C compilers
>>> work, and what works well with them, and what is relevant for them -
>>> though I certainly don't claim to know everything. Obviously Bart
>>> knows vastly more about how /his/ compiler works. He also tends to
>>> do testing with several small and odd C compilers, which can give
>>> interesting results even though they are of little practical
>>> relevance for real-world C development work.
>>>
>>
>> Since he do compilers himself, he has much better feeling [that you
>> or me] of what is hard and what is easy, what is small and what is big,
>> what is fast and what is slow. That applies to all compilers except
>> those that are very unusual. "Major" compiler are not unusual at all.
> 
> The problem is that Bart's compiler is VERY unusual. It's customized for
> his use, and he has lots of quirks in the way he thinks compilers should
> work, which are very different from those of most other programmers.


> In
> particular, compilation speed is very important to him, while execution
> speed is almost completely unimportant, which is pretty much the
> opposite of the way most programmers prioritize those things.

Compilation speed is important to everyone. That's why so many tricks 
are used to get around the lack of speed in a big compiler, or so many 
extra resources are thrown at the problem.

Runtime performance is important too, but at this level of language, the 
difference between optimised and unoptimised code is narrow. Unoptimised 
may be between 1x and 2x slower, typically.

Perhaps slower on benchmarks, or code written in C++ style that 
generates lots of redundances that relies on optimisation to make it fast.

But, during developement, you probably wouldn't use optimisation anyway.

In that case, you're still suffering slow build times with a big 
compiler, but you don't get any faster code at the end of it.

I sometimes suggest to people to use Tiny C most of the time, and run 
gcc from time to time for extra analysis and extra checks, and use 
gcc-O3 for production builds.

(I have also suggested that gcc should incorporate a -O-1 option that 
runs a secretly bundled of Tiny C.)