Re: C under Lua

[Dave Dodge <dododge@...>]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 11:25:13AM +0000, David Given wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 February 2006 06:36, Dave Dodge wrote:
> [...]
> > For those who aren't familiar with tcc, the word "fast" is an
> > understatement.  tcc is so fast compared to a typical C compiler that
> > you can hardly believe it's actually compiling the code.
> 
> It also produces *extremely bad* code. At least for ARM.

Yes, one of the way it runs so quickly is to bypass optimizations that
other compilers perform.  It also does the compilation as a single
step directly from C code to object code, rather than breaking it
into distinct stages such as preprocessing and assembly.

The i386 backend is the most complete one, for example it's the only
backend that handles inline assembly.  The performance of the
resulting code on x86 really depends on what you're doing.  I've
actually seen a small test program where tcc produced noticably faster
code than gcc, but I'd consider that to be a fluke.

                                                  -Dave Dodge