Can anyone recomend a good intoduction to C...

Steve Holden sholden at holdenweb.com
Tue Mar 6 19:20:42 EST 2001


"Roy Smith" <roy at panix.com> wrote in message
news:roy-32CDC5.15461906032001 at news.panix.com...
> "Werner Schiendl" <ws-news at gmx.at> wrote:
> > Years ago I had a lot of discussions why use C instead of Assembler.
> > The arguments were mainly for performance.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if a good optimizing C compiler can actually
> produce faster code than hand-coded assembler in many cases.

Sun were making this claim about their optimizing C compiler when I worked
for them in the 1980s. Of course, they were trying to justify unbundling it
at the time, but I believe the claims were substantially true. I don't
imagine the optimization has got worse, and assembler is certainly more
difficult for RISC machines with pipelines than on older machines.

And, of course, for any application in a high-level language which runs too
slowly, Moore's law predicts that help is just around the corner...

regards
 Steve






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