awd@ut-ngp.UUCP (Andrew W. Donoho) (11/16/85)
The Green Hills C compiler (for the Lisa Workshop) has been in beta-test for quite some time now. It produces smaller code than most of the other Mac C compilers. This is the same compiler that Apple is porting to the Mac for the Mac Workshop that I discussed in an earlier message. Darin Adler
shebanow@ernie.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike Shebanow) (11/16/85)
(beware the line eater..........) I use Green Hills C (not the Mac/Lisa version) regularly for my work. Green Hills C produces quite remarkable code. It is easily the best compiler for the 68000 I have seen, for ANY language, by a long margin. For our application, high resolution/high speed image processing, we found a code speedup of better than 20% over Whitesmiths C (yecch), and 30% smaller code. Because of its optimization, we have been able to get rid of a lot of code that was written in assembly for speed. In some cases, GHC generated faster code than the assembly code it replaced. It does have some quirks: for instance, the optional optimizer pass doesn't produce correct code, and the library code supplied was nonreentrant, buggy, and nearly unusable. Green Hills is a very small company, so support is sometimes a problem (the compiler was written by 1 programmer, who appears to do ALL of the maintanence work for all of their compilers (C, Pascal, Fortran for 68000 and 32000)). Green Hills C for the Mac should be fantastic. I can hardly wait. We paid $6000 for our compiler, and it was worth every penny. At $200-$500, it is a bargain. Andrew Shebanow shebanow@ucbernie.BERKELEY.EDU