digitalmars.D - How big is the DMD back-end?
- Don Clugston (18/18) May 02 2007 Walter - Could you give us an idea of the relative size of the source
- Walter Bright (5/8) May 02 2007 The back end is 2.1Mb of source, maybe 15% of that is the optimizer. The...
Walter - Could you give us an idea of the relative size of the source code of DMD's back-end, compared to the front end? How much of it is optimisation, and how much is code generation? I'm interested in this because of my work on the BLADE library, which is essentially a dedicated optimising compiler for array expressions. I've convinced myself that with mixins, it is possible to do almost as well as the compiler could. It's not quite as good, because (1) it doesn't have access to the results of static analysis from the optimisation step, and (2) if I generate inline asm, it interferes with the compiler's other optimisations in that function....but it's extremely close. But just because you can, doesn't mean you should <g>. Ultimately, the key question I'm interested in is, how difficult is it to do such things in a library, compared to in the compiler? If the code length is ten or a hundred times smaller when it's in the compiler, it doesn't make much sense for me to try to turn it into an industrial-strength library, and instead, I should try to package it in a way which would be easiest for you to integrate into DMD. OTOH there may be parts of the task which are easier to do from the library side.
May 02 2007
Don Clugston wrote:Walter - Could you give us an idea of the relative size of the source code of DMD's back-end, compared to the front end? How much of it is optimisation, and how much is code generation?The back end is 2.1Mb of source, maybe 15% of that is the optimizer. The front end is 1.8Mb. There's about 100Kb in other stuff. BTW, the email address I have for you doesn't work. Can you send me your current one? Thanks!
May 02 2007