Re: assembler [was: Re: cheers for gogo]

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

On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Alastair Donlon wrote:

> > I wouldn't go that far. Never seen anything even vaguely make me
> > appreciate C++ . It's bloatware spawn of the devil :-)
> 
> Fair comment, when it comes to C++.

Heh, here comes Mr. C++ to defend his language of choice ;))...

I don't know how people can call C++ bloated. For a start, it's just a
language, which may be translated into asm in any way a compiler sees fit.
There is no unique C++ -> Asm mapping function available. To call a
compiler bloated, maybe, but not the language.

Secondly, current C++ compilers generate code as well as C compilers. Take
KDE as a practical example: faster than GNOME on most systems, yet
implements more functionality (okay, this comparison isn't exactly fair,
but you see the point I'm making).

You may complain about large executables. There's a reason for this -
they're *designed* to be large. Read the GNU pages. "When programming,
should I opt for speed or size efficiency?". The answer than comes back is
speed, every time - RAM is cheap, processor cycles are not. This is why
people generate data tables rather than recalculating values, why they
unroll loops, etc. Okay, on small programs this isn't what's causing the
large overhead, but on any program of any reasonable size & complexity an
implementation in C/C++ will be faster than assembler, because computers
write better assember and better algorithms more consistently than any
human.

By the way, may I say a big Nelson Muntz (off the Simpsons ;) "Ha-ha" to
that poor person who said they had to do Modula-2?? :-)

Cheers,

Alex.

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