[TUHS] SPARC is CRAPS spelled backwards.

[Paul Winalski]

On 9/25/18, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
> Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> This paper has a nice survey of instruction set densities, which very much
> disagrees with your statement:
>
> http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/papers/iccd09/iccd09_density.pdf

Thanks for the pointer to that paper.  Interesting reading.

There is an error in Table I (Summary of Investigated Architectures).
VAX is a pure little-endian architecture and can't operate on
big-endian data without byte swizzling.  Alpha, on the other hand, can
operate either big- or little-endian (selectable at system boot time).

The version of the Intel C compiler that they used--version 9--is a
little old in the tooth.  There have been several versions released
since then.

Interesting, and disappointing, that linking statically drags in the
entire C runtime.  Lo-level RTLs such as libc ought to be designed to
minimize dependencies between individual library routines (e.g., if I
call only strcmp(), strcmp.o and nothing else should participate in
the static link).

As the paper points out, compilers are usually designed to optimize
for execution speed rather than code size these days.

-Paul W.