Reply-To: <arfa AT clara DOT net>
From: "Arthur" <arfa AT clara DOT net>
To: "DJGPP Mailing List" <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: RE: should i bother learning asm?? or just learn dx?
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 00:00:42 +0100
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> >No, you can get GNU C++ for the ST and AFAIK it's updated regularly. In fact, it's
> >not the best compiler on the ST market. The fact that the ST and Amiga had only an
> >8MHz clock rate may have had something to do with it.
>
> Definitely. The slower the machine, the tighter you have to go to the limit.
> For most programs a DX50 allows very slack programming, but usually the blame
> is not to put it on ASM vs. no ASM but rather to bad desgin.

Yes. This is another point I'm trying to get across. When people have a slow machine
they want to break the limit of what it can do. If they have a fast machine they
decide that it's not worth it - let the computer take the strain. This is very bad
programming practice.

> I once wrote a
> program that should behave on Windows like a textscreen in order to port some
> programs from DOS to Windows without changing them. At home I had a rather
> fast computer and I didn't realize how slow my algorithm was. When I got to my
> office I noticed this, because the computer I had there was rather slow. I
> rewrote the algorithm and after that, the program was almost as fast in my
> office as at home. The resulting loss of speed was due to Windows and I
> couldn't do anything about it, even if I had used ASM.

Yes, Micro$oft products are the worst offenders in failing to optimise their code
properly.

> 90% of the programs I
> optimize (I do that for a living) are ONLY optimized in design and bad
> programming (like calling a function to retrieve a pointer several times in
> one function instead of loading the pointer once at the entry and using a
> local variable).

Yes, but so many people fail to do that. It can make the difference, if you're
talking in clock cycles.

James Arthur
jaa AT arfa DOT clara DOT net
ICQ#15054819