Hello, > Has there been any thought about optimizer?
A lot. And a lot of discussions with people who know a lot more than I do in this specific area of wisdom. The final judgment is as it is: for an ITC forth there are only very few possibilities. One is a statistical analysis to find code sequences that are worth combining into one command. e.g. "dup if" can be combined to a dup-if that avoids the stack duplication and makes the flag check non-destructive (does not drop the Top-Of-Stack element). This will be both faster and smaller in the resulting code. The downside is that you'll need a real large number of such words, that nobody with his right mind would ever consider to use. And these words do need code space. It is possible, to combine this with the build process of amforth. Here you can include tailored word sets that perfectly match your other forth code needs. On the host side, you can have any amount of ressources to optimize the result ;) For a forth with a real code generator (e.g. the "competitive" flashforth) there are many more possibilities to optimize the resulting code. This optimization works on the resulting machine code, not at the forth level. The next difficulty is that an optimizer needs code space itself. For a host-based forth this should not be a problem at all, but an already size restrained system could be troublesome. The optimizer may save say 200 cells of code space and need 300 cell itself. The only solution would be the already mentioned preprocessor that works on the forth code on the host and generates other, optimized forth code or even a specialized amforth system that goes to the controller. Something the shell already does with its inline replacements of constants with their numbers. To answer the OP question: Arduino Sketches are probably always faster than amforth code. Depending of the benchmark (synthetic loops that stupidly count numbers) there may be a factor of 1:100 or more. Amforth has other strengths, IMHO ;) It is probably the smallest text interpreter (try to write such a thing in arduino sketch and beat the 8KB code space). Number-IO and formatting is another nice thing. I've seen quite a few sketches that read some data from the analog ports and try to print them to the serial port. What did I smile about them. Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, & PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel
