4 ms·

I suspect it was a misinterpretation on the part of the interviewer. If you make the (to a nontechnical writer) minor rephrasing of "design better machine lang

I suspect it was a misinterpretation on the part of the interviewer. If you make the (to a nontechnical writer) minor rephrasing of "design better machine languages" as "write better machine language" you get something better describing what the superoptimizer helps one do.

tjalfi 6y ago
I think the interviewer interpreted Massalin’s comment correctly. She was (is?) involved in the design of the MicroUnity ISA. You can find her name on quite a few of their patents. She also posted to comp.compilers[0] about an improved version of the superoptimizer. Their product was targeted at media codecs and signal processing so it would be natural to use a superoptimizer to identify whether an instruction was worth including in the ISA. AFAIK MicroUnity never shipped a product but filed a lot of early patents on SIMD. They sued a number of tech companies for patent infringement so they may still exist. [0] https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/97-07-088 https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/97-07-088