alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy) (08/31/87)
There is a company in Britain called Masthaven who are currenlty marketing an optimizing Modula-2 compiler for UNIX/V. Their compiler was originally written by Mark White at Volition Systems, but was never marketed for reasons I can't go into (I don't want to hire a lawyer...). A company in Seattle called ScenicSoft bought limited rights to this compiler in 1984, and are currently marketing their version for Stride/Sage machines. This is probably the most mature version available, since ScenicSoft has been working on it longer than Masthaven. I have the ScenicSoft version, and can report that it is VERY good. On a Stride 440 @12MHz with one wait state, 10 iterations of BYTE's Sieve benchmark (flags: ARRAY [0..8191]) executes in 1.14 seconds. For comparison, hand-coded assembly executes in 0.91 seconds. If you are interested, mail me and I'll mail you addresses and phone numbers. --alan@pdn
joel@DECWRL.DEC.COM.UUCP (09/01/87)
The highly optimizing Modula-2 compiler marketed by Masthaven was written by
Mark Allen, who worked at Volition Systems, a now defunct company for reasons
I won't go into publicly.
Mark is brilliant, and his goal was to generate better code for the 68000 than
any other compiler available. Especially C compilers. We were tired of the
claims that C is so great because it is an "efficient" language and compiles
well into machine code.
While there are a few things Mark's compiler doesn't do perfectly, its
register optimization is particularly good - constants used in loops will be
moved into registers, for example, and it tries very hard to allocate
registers only over the most useful extent of an expressions lifetime.
I must admit that we did look over the code it produced for the Byte benchmark
pretty carefully, but all the optimizations that were put in as a result of
that inspection were of general use too.
I'm happy to hear that someone is releasing this compiler finally on UNIX. I
know nothing about Masthaven, but can vouch for Mark Allen's code. I doubt
you'll find many compilers for the 68000 even approaching the optimization
that Mark pulled off.
- Joel McCormack {ihnp4 decvax ucbvax allegra}!decwrl!joel
joel@decwrl.dec.com
(Ex-president of Volition Systems. Currently working on making Mike Powell's
Modula-2 compiler for the VAX into a production quality compiler. No promises
intended, these are not the official opinions of my employer, etc.)