[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[John Wallace]

On Nov 27, 5:47 am, "John Reagan" <johnrrea... at earthlink.net> wrote:
> "Neil Rieck" <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote in message
>
> news:b9757ffd-1cc9-4a35-b566-14f11621a604 at d21g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>
> >I agree. Besides, IA64 required new compiler technology which never
> >really materialized so it was all for nothing. At least DEC had
> >produced some pretty neat code generators for Alpha.
>
> Not sure on what you mean.  The same GEM code generator for Alpha is the one
> we use for Itanium.  You get all the optimizations you get on Alpha.  Does
> it take full advantage of all the Itanium additional features, no it does
> not.  But you get all the loop optimization, routine inlining, dataflow
> analysis, etc. that you get on Alpha.
>
> The code generater used by the HP-UX side is pretty darned good as well as
> the Intel code generator.  Both know how to use the various data and control
> speculation on the chip.  Have you looked at them at all?
>
> John

"you get all the loop optimization, routine inlining, dataflow
analysis, etc. that you get on Alpha."

Whilst these may have been leading edge once upon a time, surely
surely surely (?) they are fairly standard stuff these days, no? Does
gcc 4 do those to any useful extent, for example? Does Visual Studio
do those (either on x86 or on IA64)?

And with IA64 you also afaict get a variety of often unavoidable run-
time penalties (alignment faults etc being the classic example) which
were largely things that Alpha users didn't need to worry too much
about, and are things that AMD64 users don't need to worry too much
about.