3 ms·
The unmentioned history here is memory use. In ye olden days, machines had much less memory and required more passes, simply because there was no space for all
by le-mark 9y ago
The unmentioned history here is memory use. In ye olden days, machines had much less memory and required more passes, simply because there was no space for all the data. So one might see a pass for preprocessing, lexing, ast generation, optimizations, code generation, etc. Note some of this exist today, ie gcc integrates with gas and flags to dump the assembler.
- pjmlp 9y agoYep, implementing a compiler with systems having 512 KB maximum on average did not leave too much space for clever optimizations. Using compilers on 8 bit systems was even worse (max 64KB). Many game studios used UNIX/VMS systems, with cross compilers to upload data into ZX and C64 computers as development cycle.