Re: Cheers for GoGo.

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Andrew Basterfield wrote:

> Linux, as with most of the free unices are multi-platform - lets face it if
> an application is written in assember it will most likely be written for x86
> and ports for other chips will never materialise. A lot of work has been
> done porting Linux to many diverse architectures and it seems a shame to tie
> an application to the labotomised x86 chips.

Of course, the alternative argument is that well-tuned assembler routines
may not be platform independent, but certainly are OS independent. Used to
do this on the Amiga all the time: load binary file, jump to start, hope
we come back in tact ;). As long as you're just performing algorithms on
memory (i.e., processing data, which is exactly what assembler routines
should be used for), you don't need the OS because you're not doing any
IO. This extends to fb devices (essentially pixmaps on most modern
architectures), and other memory-mapped peripherals ;)) 

That said, the reason for coding in assembler really is very small, but
I'm sure I'm not going to convince ardent asm people on this list ;)
Generally, the speed up is only 10% maximum (freaks of nature where the
asm program fits into cache and the C program doesn't don't count), and
you lose your nice paradigms (OO, type checking, etc ;) which is hardly
worth it... IMHO, of course ;P

Cheers,

Alex.

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