Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/08/31/23:16:27
On Fri, 29 Aug 1997, Michael L. Smith wrote:
..
> Shane,
>
> I was not aware what the -03 option did. It looks like Orlando is looking for
> every advantage he can get. In previous post he accused Omni of using register
> variables (which it was not) and then using them for himself. Now that I find
> out what the -03 does, it appears he really wants to stack the deck. What some
> people may be missing in all this is that we at Omni have a very high regard
> for both gcc and DJGPP or we wouldn't have invested over a 1000 man-hours into
> Omni which uses these great resources. The real point of the post was to show
> that one could obtain respectable speed (compared to C) using OmniBasic which
> is a higher level language and probably more suited for certain applications
> and at the same time not give up pointers, portability, etc.
I'm not looking for every advantage I can get or stacking the deck :)
I was merely pointing out that giving GCC higher levels of optimization
will produce faster code. I don't think it should be _that_ hard to tell
OmniBasic to use -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer and get even faster speeds.
However: I stick by my original premise that a do-nothing loop is
basically braindead as a benchmark. Even BYTE Magazine in the early 1980's
was using the Sieve of Eratosthenes as a Basic benchmark, and NOT a
do-nothing loop.
I am a (somewhat great) fan of Basic, I've used Turbo/Power/Quick/Visual
Basic. And I think it's great that Basic can approach/exceed the speed of
C-compiled code. The reason I shifted to C was because I discovered that
QuickBasic was not quick at all -- about 1/3rd the speed of the old Turbo
C I was using at the time.
I wasn't accusing Omni of anything :)
(Unless it's offering a crippled version of OmniBasic :)
I really would consider using it, except how BIG is BIG? I don't want to
start writing a project and find out that it won't compile. Call me
spoiled by free software, but I really don't see any reason to use Basic
if I have to pay a significant amount for it, considering that I can use C
for free :) I'm not saying that charging for software isn't right. But
I'm perfectly happy with GCC.
BTW: you mentioned that the Linux version of OmniBasic has XForms support.
I use XForms myself with C/C++. Since OmniBasic is commercial, I presume
you've had to license XForms from Dr Zhao? have you modified the Form
Designer to output Basic code?
Cheers!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Orlando Alcantara Andico
WWW: http://www2.mozcom.com/~orly/ Email: orly AT mozcom DOT com
ICBM: 14 30 00 N 120 59 00 E POTS: (+632) 932-2385
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