>One of the more notable examples is for the Alpha. The Digital
>c89 compiler produces code through an optimizer. Then the
>assembler does peephole optimization. And then the linker
>does global dead code removal. All it means is that the days
>of writing tight hand coded assembler is long gone :-)
When I worked with my first RISC chip (an early MIPS
processor, circa 1990) I was briefly skeptical, but MIPS
used (possibly even invented) that same strategy: translate
your C with a very good compiler and a very good assembler
and feed the results through their magic linker that chewed
up EVERYTHING and spit it out sometimes totally rearranged.
The resultant machine code could be so subtle and elegant,
showing almost human insight and trickery, that on at least
one occasion I can recall my hair literally standing on end.
Of course, it was a real joybuzzer any time we had to
disassemble/debug such ultra-optimized code since it
seemed to be entirely unrelated to the original C sources...
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