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From: joel@DECWRL.DEC.COM.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2
Subject: Re: Optimized M2
Message-ID: <8709010126.AA10507@vulcan.dec.com>
Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 21:35:13 EDT
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Posted: Mon Aug 31 21:35:13 1987
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The highly optimizing Modula-2 compiler marketed by Masthaven was written by
Mark Allen, who worked at Volition Systems, a now defunct company for reasons
I won't go into publicly.

Mark is brilliant, and his goal was to generate better code for the 68000 than
any other compiler available.  Especially C compilers.  We were tired of the
claims that C is so great because it is an "efficient" language and compiles
well into machine code.

While there are a few things Mark's compiler doesn't do perfectly, its
register optimization is particularly good - constants used in loops will be
moved into registers, for example, and it tries very hard to allocate
registers only over the most useful extent of an expressions lifetime.

I must admit that we did look over the code it produced for the Byte benchmark
pretty carefully, but all the optimizations that were put in as a result of
that inspection were of general use too.

I'm happy to hear that someone is releasing this compiler finally on UNIX.  I
know nothing about Masthaven, but can vouch for Mark Allen's code.  I doubt
you'll find many compilers for the 68000 even approaching the optimization
that Mark pulled off.

  - Joel McCormack {ihnp4 decvax ucbvax allegra}!decwrl!joel
		 joel@decwrl.dec.com

(Ex-president of Volition Systems.  Currently working on making Mike Powell's
Modula-2 compiler for the VAX into a production quality compiler.  No promises
intended, these are not the official opinions of my employer, etc.)