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Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language

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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:


> In some sense many RISCs are C processors (or maybe Pascal), because
> the benchmarks they were tuned for were written in C or Pascal,

Benchmarks are still largely written in C, so you could say that nearly
all modern processors are, if not designed for C, at least tuned for
maximum C performance.  Even media ISA extensions, though mostly
programmed in assembler, are mainly intended for writing libraries that
make C benchmarks (such as media decoders) run faster.

More importantly, design decision that may potentially hurt C
performance are never made, even if they might benefit implementations
of other languages.  And features that are difficult to use from C but
may benefit other languages have low priority.

For example, few processors designed after 1990 have good support for
multiprecision integer arithmetic (such as carry flags, NxN->2N
multipliers and integer divison instructions that also provide
remainder).

Similarly, the vendor-mandated procedure call standards are also highly
C specific: No standardised way of handling exceptions, multiple
function results, tail calls, GC etc., as these are not interesting for
C.

	Torben

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Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language jsavard@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) - 2011-07-15 00:24 +0000
  Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language nmm1@cam.ac.uk - 2011-07-15 08:36 +0100
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Bill Findlay <yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2011-07-15 18:05 +0100
  Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2011-07-15 08:14 +0000
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> - 2011-07-15 10:32 +0000
      Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2011-07-15 10:18 -0400
      Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2011-07-15 16:30 +0000
        Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2011-07-15 14:26 -0400
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language torbenm@diku.dk (Torben Ægidius Mogensen) - 2011-07-15 14:26 +0200
      Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> - 2011-07-15 15:59 +0200
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language jsavard@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) - 2011-07-15 13:48 +0000

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