Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!paperboy!meissner From: meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m88k Subject: Re: What's the status of "reorder"? Message-ID: Date: 12 Mar 90 15:19:22 GMT References: <25FAE940.21905@paris.ics.uci.edu> Sender: news@OSF.ORG Organization: Open Software Foundation Lines: 32 In-reply-to: rfg@paris.ics.uci.edu's message of 12 Mar 90 00:11:44 GMT In article <25FAE940.21905@paris.ics.uci.edu> rfg@paris.ics.uci.edu (Ronald Guilmette) writes: | Hey folks! I'm sure that sombody who reads this group should have an | answer for my question. | | I'd like to know what the current status of the program called "reorder" | is. I don't know what the current status is, but reorder was available with the Motorola Toolkit (for which you need the appropriate System V.[23] license). | I have only heard about this program via word of mouth. It is rumored to | be a assembly code (or object code) optimizer for the 88k, produced by | Motorola. The last thing that I heard about it was that it was kinda | broken, e.g. it would optimize away the bodies of switch statements :-( Reorder took assembly code as input, and spit assembly code out. The version I looked at (the 0.6 version) was indeed broken. My vague memory is, it was removed from the 1.0 toolkit. The problem with switch statements is that reorder does dead code elimination, eliminating instructions and labels if nobody jumped to them. The problem was it didn't consider references to labels in .word sections to be references, and did indead delete switch statements. The only time I measured the performance that reorder added, it gave 5% (certainly less than 10%) on drystone. The code was also unreadable. -- Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861 Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA Catproof is an oxymoron, Childproof is nearly so