I'd like to thank Florian, Jonas and Pierre especially for the humbling
education I have received over the past few months. The relay and
eventual rejection of my original x86-64 optimizer overhaul has taught
me a few things about being too ambitious and also maybe too clever
sometimes with some optimisations that might subtly backfire later.
After the rejection I selected a piece of the overhaul that was
relatively independent of everything else but still substantial in its
own right, and Florian was happy for me to develop that. My research
led me to find new optimisations (like the conditional subset thing that
helped to improve the shortcutting of jump chains) but to also learn how
to program and test on other platforms, since getting it to work on
x86_64-win64 was one thing, but having it compile and work on everything
else was another matter entirely. MIPS, for example, taught me that how
one platform handles conditional jumps might be completely different to
another, and I have to accommodate for that.
I like to think I'm older and wiser when it comes to developing on a
team now thanks to my experience with the Free Pascal Compiler. So once
again, thank you everyone, and I hope to continue contributing for a
while yet!
Gareth aka. Kit
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
