On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 1:41 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Fast" is subjective (unless you mean compile-time speed, which I'm
> assuming here). There are too many diverse x86 machines (with
> different speeds) to call anything universally fast anymore.
>
I was referring to both compile time (PowerBASIC often compiled my programs
in less than a second) and speed of the finished executable. For example, I
once made a simple program to do a constant benchmark (a simple incremented
loop) and display the result every second. The program was compiled under
QBASIC, PowerBASIC and VisualBASIC for DOS, and all three resulting
executables were run on the same machine. The one made with PowerBASIC blew
the others out of the water, achieving significantly higher numbers than
either of the others.
>
> Also, there are hundreds of programming languages (and cpus and OSes),
> and apparently no one group targets very many (anymore? did they
> ever?). It's quite disappointing how few compilers themselves are
> actually portable.
>
Agreed!
> OpenWatcom is of course much less popular than GCC for its own
> development and thus weaker but is still also relatively good. Too bad
> most people ignore it. (I still haven't tried the unofficial 2.0-pre
> builds.)
>
Nor have I. I didn't even realize they were that far along lol
FreeBASIC is not officially "optimizing" like the above but still
> behaves loads better than a toy. It's quite robust, all things
> considered.
>
Indeed, I was quite impressed with it and will most likely use it for some
future projects.
Honestly, writing and maintaining a compiler is very hard work (not
> that I would know personally).
>
I started a BASIC compiler *wayyy* back in the day and experienced the...
joy? of writing one firsthand. Needless to say that project was abandoned
pretty quickly. If my version of BASIC would've given significant benefits
over any other BASIC out there, I (maybe) would've continued, but with
PowerBASIC, QB64 and FreeBASIC doing so was pointless.
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