Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Compilers and efficiency
Message-ID: <1991Apr23.151932.2125@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1991 15:19:32 GMT
References: <7184@auspex.auspex.com> <12740@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <MEISSNER.91Apr21153714@curley.osf.org>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <MEISSNER.91Apr21153714@curley.osf.org> meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
>| ... The reason it was easy was because the machine code for a
>| procedure prologue, contained (get this) a *call* to the runtime
>| package...
>
>If I remember correctly, the Unix V6 (Ritchie) compiler did this too...

All instantiations of the Ritchie compiler did it, in fact.  On the whole,
it made sense:  it saved code space, which was usually more of an issue on
the 11 than execution time.  And it wasn't actually that much slower than
inlining the relevant code, given that we're talking about machines that
had little or no pipelining.
-- 
And the bean-counter replied,           | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"beans are more important".             |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
