Nieminen Juha wrote:

>   Nowadays, however, the CPU's have evolved to such an extent and they are
> so extremely complicated, that the same tricks of the old asm coding do not
> hold anymore. To beat a good C-compiler it would require so much knowledge
> about the CPU (and often other hardware) that it's almost impossible for
> the average asm-coder.

The new complexity is also reason to pity the compiler writers!
 
-Mark Gordon

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Mark Gordon wrote:

> The new complexity is also reason to pity the compiler writers!

Pity or respect ?

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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Ken wrote:
> 
> Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> > The new complexity is also reason to pity the compiler writers!
> 
> Pity or respect ?

I respect them if they write good compilers.  I pity them regardless.
;-)

-Mark Gordon

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> > What about Borland (Inprise ;-)) C++ compiler? No one mentions it. Is it
not
> > of the same class as Watcom and MS?
>
> No, it isn't. It's about twice as expensive and does not optimize
> as good. Watcom has long been the compiler producing the fastest code,
> no overtaken by MS.

Which version of the compiler are you referring to? Be careful, your
(Markus') above statement by itself is not objective and comes close to
being merely flame-bait. Which version of the compiler are you referring to?
Did you do an apples-to-apples comparison yourself?

I test compiled povray 3.0 a while back using Borland C++ 4.5 (IIRC) and it
*was* slightly slower than the normal binary downloaded from povray.org. I
would be interested to see the results of a comparison using the Borland
C++Builder 4.0 compiler compared with binaries produced by other compilers.

I am writing a flight dynamics model for the open source flight simulator
called FlightGear (www.flightgear.org). My C++ source code is compilable
under the CygWin compiler (egcs 2.91-xx), all Borland compilers, gcc under
Linux, cc under IRIX, and - with some hacks - under MSVC++ 6.0 (which does
not #define M_PI in its headers like every other header file set does).
Compliance to standards is important to me, and MS skirts the edge - and
sometimes steps over the edge - in my experience.

You are right when saying that Borland is not in the same class as Watcom
and MS. For my needs, they are way above the rest of the crowd. They may not
have a compiler which produces the fastest *povray* executable, but until I
see a fair comparison using the latest versions of all compilers tested,
statements like yours claiming poor optimization and slow binaries will be
taken with a grain of salt (no offense meant).

jb

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"Jon S. Berndt" wrote:
> 
> Which version of the compiler are you referring to? Be careful, your
> (Markus') above statement by itself is not objective and comes close to
> being merely flame-bait. Which version of the compiler are you referring to?
> Did you do an apples-to-apples comparison yourself?

I was comparing Borland C++-Builder 4 with MSVC++ 6 and Watcom 11.b
all (at that time) the latest.

> You are right when saying that Borland is not in the same class as Watcom
> and MS. For my needs, they are way above the rest of the crowd. They may not

When it comes to interface design and how good the class library is,
definitely yes. But I like the MS-IDE better. 

Markus

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