3 ms·

The article assumes that no software in bin is written natively in asm or has asm blocks or linked objects... which seems a bit out there.

• Nacraile 10y ago
  My thought was that most binary distributions probably use very conservative configuration that will generate code that compatible with very old processors, and that you would therefore not see much use of modern instructions in /bin. This is one of the selling points of compile-yourself distributions like Arch/Gentoo: you know what processor you're running on, so you can take full advantage of its features.
  • pepijndevos 10y ago
    I'm running Ubuntu. Would be interesting to see output from a Gentoo user. [edit] Gentoo: https://bpaste.net/raw/160c1fc57842 https://bpaste.net/raw/160c1fc57842 More Gentoo: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/BOVT5z1G93GRmGGfUyQQ/ https://paste.pound-python.org/show/BOVT5z1G93GRmGGfUyQQ/
  • dyladan 10y ago
    I was under the impression that outside the AUR, Arch is primarily based on binary distribution.
• dyladan 10y ago
  That doesn't really take away from the finding though. This is obviously not meant to be a thorough analysis of what opcodes a compiler "knows" (he could have just looked at the source code for gnu cc if that were the case), but rather a quick and dirty hack showing the opcodes in actual use. Furthermore, I would assume that handwritten or inlined asm is an insignificant portion of all the opcodes in bin, making it statistically irrelevant for the pie chart. Also, handwritten asm could only add opcodes to the count of unique opcodes in bin, meaning those 200 are not only not used by the compiler, but also not used in handwritten code.