[Gllug] The importance of the PC to free software (was Barbican website...)

[Nix]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Pete Ryland said:
> On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 12:54:18PM +0000, Nix wrote:
>> Quite so. GCC still shows its architectural heritage as a compiler for
>> CISC chips (m68k and SPARC).
> 
> I guess you mean RISC.

Hm, er, yes. What an embarrassing typo.

It expects lots of registers and situations where the CPU doesn't do
massive predictive churning on the assembler once it's got at it...

... which is a bit of a shame, because common CPUs these days are the
opposite. Luckily this is being fixed fast enough, now that (e.g.) IBM
have let us use their graph colouring register allocator patents and
so on.

-- 
`I keep hearing about SF writers dying, but I never hear about SF
 writers being born.  So I guess eventually there'll be none left.'
                                    -- Keith F. Lynch


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