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Transmeta Needs Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Faced with dwindling sales, it looks like Transmeta
needs Microsoft's new tablet PC to survive." Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
I'm writing to share a tragic little story.
My compnay has a processor that my friends and I are trying to market. One night, I was tallying up sales on it, when all of a sudden I went berserk, we were losing money, money, money. All of it. And it was a good design! I had...........
My name is Linus Torvald, and I made a deal with the devil.
I've seen the exact same thing with the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. Yeah, shoot me, I use it (to compile a non-M$ operating system). It's a pretty f*cking good compiler. (no offense but the assembler output surpassed the GCC compiler easily last time I checked, which is about a year ago)
I only use the command-line compiler and from time to time I look at the assembler output. It's amazing. Proper object oriented C++ design is being translated in assembler that you could only equal by extensive use of macros and other 'tricks' that would make the assembler practically impossible to read/maintain.
The whole trick is knowing how code is generated by the compiler. I remember from the good ole days that Torvalds would do the exact same thing: see what code is generated. This way, after a while, you know instinctively what's the best way to design and write code.
I'm sure there are situations where a human could write better assembler than what's generated by a compiler, but if you are talking anything less trivial than an 'hello world' example, the perceived 'overhead' from a compiler would be required in assembler just as well in order to maintain readable/understandable code and design.