🚀 go-pugleaf

>$ History's greatest mistakes give rise to history's greatest successes.
>$ When there is failure (Multics, VAX architecture, i8086) it causes
>$ fanatics to go 180 degrees in the other direction, often with good
>$ results (Unix, RISC, Awesome 8x86 optimizing compiler technology).
>
>Out of curiousity, and not trying to start a new religious war, what
>about the VAX architecture do you consider a failure?

or ``Awesome 8x86 optimizing compiler technology'' ??
Are there any useful optimizations possible on an 8086?

I can imagine constant propagation/folding and expression
rearrangement (to minimize register pressure).
Generally, there aren't enough registers to hold any
common subexpressions or loop invarients or variables.
Perhaps the architecture motivated some of the work on
automatic generation of code generators, especially for
instruction selection; but I think the VAX was more important.
(I'm thinking of Graham and Henry).

On the other hand, I think Turbo Pascal suprised a lot of people,
showing how fast a compiler could be on on a relatively
small/slow machine.  No new optimization work though.
Nowadays, I'm impressed with the speed of Silicon Valley Software
(SVS) based compilers.

Regards,
Preston Briggs