Timeline for How small is the footprint of a small C compiler?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
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| Feb 20, 2015 at 21:22 | comment | added | Robert Harvey | @supercat: Thanks for pointing out the obvious on a post that's over a year old. | |
| Feb 20, 2015 at 19:47 | comment | added | supercat | @RobertHarvey: FYI, the most recent version of the C# compiler is written in C#. | |
| Feb 20, 2015 at 19:46 | comment | added | supercat |
@MSalters: The code wasn't terribly efficient, but it was loads better than BASIC. Further, I had a free third-party tool to take a suitably-formatted assembly-language source file and produce an "inline" directive, using >identifier and similar notations to identify variables by name. The difference between what the compiler generated and optimal code was more significant for small routines than big ones, so a dozen or so lines of assembly could in some cases allow a ten-fold overall performance boost.
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| Oct 12, 2013 at 2:27 | comment | added | Robert Harvey | @MSalters: Well, Pascal as a language wasn't designed specifically for writing compilers. People could still get the same performance that the compiler got by writing their programs the way Borland wrote their compiler, with the accompanying tradeoffs. I think that there is a general sense in the programming community that all languages should be capable of everything, but that's just not reality. FWIW programs written and compiled in Turbo Pascal did perform pretty well. Microsoft's C# compiler is written in C++; the Mono compiler is self-hosting. | |
| Oct 11, 2013 at 9:43 | comment | added | MSalters | Says a lot, if you think about it: the authors of Turbo Pascal didn't use Pascal inside their compiler. It might be fast, but the code produced clearly wasn't that efficient. | |
| Oct 11, 2013 at 6:14 | vote | accept | Niklas Rosencrantz | ||
| Oct 11, 2013 at 5:46 | comment | added | Robert Harvey | I remember Turbo Pascal 1.0. It compiled in 10 seconds a program I wrote that took 10 minutes to compile on an Apple IIe using the Apple Pascal compiler. | |
| Oct 11, 2013 at 5:43 | history | answered | John R. Strohm | CC BY-SA 3.0 |