Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!b-tech!mingin.engin.umich.edu!news
From: billkatt@mondo.engin.umich.edu (billkatt)
Subject: Re: MPW compiler bugs (was: interface war)
In-Reply-To: <1990Feb14.004350.14475@oracle.com>
Message-ID: <1990Feb14.204332.24800@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Organization: University of Michigan CAEN
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 90 20:43:32 GMT

In article <1990Feb14.004350.14475@oracle.com> you write:
>> From: jln@acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad)
>> In article <1046@watserv1.waterloo.edu> bmwrkshp@watserv1.waterloo.edu ( 
>> Wrkshp Id - Sys Design ) writes:
>> > But I'm sure THINK C is still an order of magnitude
>> > faster. Don't know what that linker is doing. Sure takes its own
>> > sweet time even on Mac II's.
>> 
>> As I understand it, one of the reasons is that MPW's linker is much 
>> smarter.  For example, it lets you direct individual routines within a 
>> single module to different segments, and it eliminates dead code.  I'm not 
>> sure about all this, though.
>> 
>John, I will agree with you, though, about the Linker.  Think C
>includes code a whole file at a time -- it won't pick out individual
>routines from a file.  MPW C will do this.  What I don't get is why
>Think C hasn't changed this by now -- they've had a few versions to do
>it.  Heck, in high school when I wrote the Rascal compiler for the
>Mac, I wrote a linker that did dead code analysis and picked out a
>routine at a time.  Surely, Mike Kahl could do it.

Think C DOES indeed remove dead code, ever since version 3.0.  It doesn't seem
to do quite as good a job as MPW 3.0, but a good job none the less.  To
remove dead code, just check the 'Smart Link' check box when you build your
app/DA/whatever.  You can go out and prove it to yourself by writing a
program which uses one small routine from the ANSI library, and building it to
disk.  Whereas the ANSI library is 27K long, your program will come out to
about 5 or 6K.

-Steve Bollinger
billkatt@mondo.engin.umich.edu