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From: grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Compiler Costs
Message-ID: <23285@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 9 Jul 90 20:20:30 GMT
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In-reply-to: atk@boulder.Colorado.EDU's message of 9 Jul 90 15:30:25 GMT


The MIPS compiler suite (and old bit of software, too) does global
optimization. I think that they still adhere to a set register passing
convention, but they do things like eliminate stack manipulation for
leaf procedures, etc etc.

Several people (Steinkist & Hennessy, Wahl, Wallace) have investigated
the advantages of global register allocation at link time, and it does
very well.  You don't even need to have runtime performance data to
tune the allocation; simple bottom-up coloring appears to work very
well.

Someone just needs to hack it into Gnu C. This would raise the common
denominator of compiler performance & make companies either provide
something of comparable performance or support the Gnu compiler. I
still can't believe how many systems are shipped with shitty
compilers.