Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 15:46:19 -0500 (CDT) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com> To: J McKitrick <jcm@freebsd-uk.eu.org> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: assembly vs C Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.1000509154027.59545A-100000@shell-2.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <20000509212637.A73322@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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On Tue, 9 May 2000, J McKitrick wrote: > I've heard some debates recently, mostly by 'old-school' hackers from the > C64 days who are calling for a return to machine language. They claim that > CPU speed, memory size, and HD space will begin to plateau soon, and that ML > would bring a much needed return to efficiency and clean coding. Anybody who thinks that assembly is going to make a big comeback hasn't looked at writing code for modern processors. While there are people who can produce code that is as efficent as the stuff cranked out by a good compiler, there aren't that many. There aren't nearly as many as there were during the era of the 6502 and the Z-80. The compilers have gotten much better and the chips much harder to write code for. I am sure that assembly will stick around for a while, for things like low-level OS glue, and the occaisonal tightly optimized loop. I can't imagine anyone writing a large application in assembly for the Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, or IA-64. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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