Path: csiph.com!xmission!news.snarked.org!border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: algorithm performance, was Add nested-function support in a language the based on a stack-machine Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2018 14:06:31 GMT Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien Lines: 32 Sender: news@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <18-03-094@comp.compilers> References: <6effed5e-6c90-f5f4-0c80-a03c61fd2127@gkc.org.uk> <18-03-042@comp.compilers> <18-03-047@comp.compilers> <18-03-075@comp.compilers> <18-03-077@comp.compilers> <18-03-090@comp.compilers> <18-03-092@comp.compilers> Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="34913"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" Keywords: performance, comment Posted-Date: 24 Mar 2018 18:50:24 EDT X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:2024 Andy Walker writes: > Somewhat more to the point, as this is "comp.compilers", >it seems unlikely that either the compiler or the source being >compiled have grown by anything like the growth in RAM, despite the >unfortunate modern [ie last 40-odd years!] tendency towards bloat. One of the papers I saw during this recent discussion mentions that one of Wirth's early compilers (PL/360 IIRC) self-compiled in IIRC 25s on a machine of the time, i.e., late 1960s (which the author of the paper found quite impressive). In 1992, I heard a keynote address by Wirth (at CC'92), where he contrasted Oberon with C++, and used self-compilation time as one metric: The Oberon compiler compiled itself in IIRC 6s, which he contrasted with IIRC 20 minutes for the C++ compiler. The last few times that I built a recent gcc, it took several hours to compile itself (three stages, and it included several front-ends, but still); interestingly, I rebuilt gcc-2.7 in 2015, and that took only a few minutes. Software bloats to fill the memory and run-time that is deemed acceptable. Whether that means more or less sophistication in the algorithms varies from case to case. - anton -- M. Anton Ertl anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/ [Back in the 1970s, the Dartmouth BASIC compiler was so fast that nobody bothered to save object code. It rarely took more than a few clock ticks from source code to starting the executable. -John]