Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 10 November 2005 12:08 am, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
> What I was taught in my course on hardware in college years ago is that
> some compilers on "RISC" processors skipped assembler, and wrote in a
> more cryptic instruction set which was virtually impossible for a human
> to make sense of. The assembler instructions for such systems is written
> as a "higher level" language.
Most modern compilers generate their code directly rather than calling the 
assembler. Some of the reasons for this is optimization and scheduling. 
Although on the Digital Alpha with our older compiler we went through the 
assembler (a beast written in a dialect of Pascal). We rewrote the 
assembler from scratch, but we also switched compilers to Dec's new 
compiler that was able to optimize better. In the old assembler, the 
schduler was added to the end of the assembler where it would go through 
the code stream, with the new assembler, the scheduler was integrated and 
operated on the assembler's internal data structure. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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