🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <mwm.2n6z@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us> mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer) writes:
>In <Bxq7y0.IJ@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) wrote:
>> With instruction scheduling, one place for an optimizer would be in the
>> ASSEMBLER, and even interaction between the programmer and the compiler/
>> assembler.  I do not know of any such.
>
>Herman, I've *never* seen you suggest something that hasn't been tried
>already, in some form or another. This is no exception. It's been
>tried. It didn't work very well.

On at least the Sun-3 cc/as there is a flag which implies that the
assember is doing something tricky with the code the compiler spits
out, eg some sort of peephole optimisation based on what the compiler
wanted to say rather than on what it actually said...

Ah, and on the Sun-4 as well, I see.  Though this isn't exactly what
Dr Rubin was talking about, I think, it's still relevant...


AS(1)                    USER COMMANDS                      AS(1)
 
NAME
     as - Sun-1, Sun-2 and Sun-3, Sun-4 and Sun386i assemblers

...

  Sun-4 Options
     -O[n]
          Enable peephole optimization corresponding to optimiza-
          tion  level  n  (1 if n not specified) of the Sun high-
          level language compilers.   This  option  can  be  used
          safely only when assembling code produced by a Sun com-
          piler.

-- 
Damon Hart-Davis                          Internet: dhd@exnet.co.uk, d@hd.org

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