des7f@uvacs.cs.Virginia.EDU (David Sappington) (10/06/89)
I work in a variety of machine environments and one thing that bugs me about THINK C is that there is no compiler provision for optimization. Before the flames arrive let me just say that THINK C is a great development environment and I love the debugger ... BUT ... wouldn't it be nice if they had an optimizing compiler that you could use on your production code? Sure I can improve times with register variables but IMHO I shouldn't have to --- that's what compilers are for. Furthermore, attempts at hand optimizing are often at odds with producing clear and concise code. Perhaps the best thing for Symantec to do would be to offer an extra cost (heh, you get what you pay for) optimizing compiler for those times when you prefer to trade off compilation speed for execution speed. Also how about a compiler switch to make int's (including constants) 32-bit? I survive right now on #defines but a compiler switch would be nice. (All other environments that I deal with use 32-bit ints.) Finally, I've heard some good things about MPW C but I've not used it. How good is the code that it generates? Anyone have any thoughts about moving back and forth between it and THINK C? Currently I'm most interested in "vanilla" C though in the past and probably (I hope :-)) the future my applications will be more along the traditional Mac model. Dave Sappington Institute for Parallel Computation University of Virginia des7f@virginia.edu