4 ms·

All the other compilers in the comparison are C compilers, right? Whereas this compiler is compiling its own home made language? So not sure how the comparison

All the other compilers in the comparison are C compilers, right? Whereas this compiler is compiling its own home made language? So not sure how the comparison can be valid.

pubby 4y ago
FWIW the custom language is very close to C, and the examples are pretty much a 1-1 transposition. I agree with you though on a different note. It's dubious to compare compilers by benchmarking them, because tests are highly arbitrary and are won/lost based on single weak links. It's not really an exact science, but rather something you can start with to figure out how things are behaving. I mostly base my opinions by looking at the assembly code each compiler generates, but a single bar graph is a better presentation for articles.
- matt_d 4y ago
  It could be fun to compare with Action!--it's been known to compile a reasonably good 6502 assembly (considerably better than other compiled languages for that platform), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language), It has been released as open-source together with the binaries, https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Action https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Action You should be able to run these using an Atari 8-bit (XL/XE model) emulator, like Atari800, https://github.com/atari800/atari800/releases https://github.com/atari800/atari800/releases or Altirra, https://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html https://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html
mmphosis 4y ago
I think NESFab is a medium level programming language targeting the NES 6502. On NES, the Decimal flag has no effect. GNU Compiler Collection no longer targets 6502, but an older version of the GNU C Compiler could. LLVM targeting 6502 is limited. There is also the cc65 cross compiler. [1] LLVM [2] and GCC [3] are compiler and toolchain technologies. The name Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is no longer officially an acronym, and the GNU C Compiler is now the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). [1] https://www.cc65.org/ https://www.cc65.org/ [2] https://www.llvm.org/ https://www.llvm.org/ [3] https://gcc.gnu.org/ https://gcc.gnu.org/
exDM69 4y ago
No, not really. LLVM is not a C compiler, it consumes an intermediate representation. Clang is the C compiler which produces LLVM IR. Likewise, GCC contains a C compiler but the machine specific parts like the codegen take an intermediate representation (GCC has several) as input. Almost no compilers out there compile directly from C to machine code, there is one or more intermediate forms in between. C is not a good input language for an optimizing compiler. It's a good and entirely valid comparison. It's the backend codegen that is being compared, the language frontend does not really play a part in it.

All the other compilers in the comparison are C compilers, right? Whereas this compiler is compiling its own home made language? So not sure how the comparison can be valid.

pubby 4y ago

FWIW the custom language is very close to C, and the examples are pretty much a 1-1 transposition. I agree with you though on a different note. It's dubious to compare compilers by benchmarking them, because tests are highly arbitrary and are won/lost based on single weak links. It's not really an exact science, but rather something you can start with to figure out how things are behaving. I mostly base my opinions by looking at the assembly code each compiler generates, but a single bar graph is a better presentation for articles.

matt_d 4y ago
It could be fun to compare with Action!--it's been known to compile a reasonably good 6502 assembly (considerably better than other compiled languages for that platform), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language), It has been released as open-source together with the binaries, https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Action https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Action You should be able to run these using an Atari 8-bit (XL/XE model) emulator, like Atari800, https://github.com/atari800/atari800/releases https://github.com/atari800/atari800/releases or Altirra, https://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html https://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html

mmphosis 4y ago

I think NESFab is a medium level programming language targeting the NES 6502. On NES, the Decimal flag has no effect. GNU Compiler Collection no longer targets 6502, but an older version of the GNU C Compiler could. LLVM targeting 6502 is limited. There is also the cc65 cross compiler. [1] LLVM [2] and GCC [3] are compiler and toolchain technologies. The name Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is no longer officially an acronym, and the GNU C Compiler is now the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). [1] https://www.cc65.org/ https://www.cc65.org/ [2] https://www.llvm.org/ https://www.llvm.org/ [3] https://gcc.gnu.org/ https://gcc.gnu.org/

exDM69 4y ago

No, not really. LLVM is not a C compiler, it consumes an intermediate representation. Clang is the C compiler which produces LLVM IR. Likewise, GCC contains a C compiler but the machine specific parts like the codegen take an intermediate representation (GCC has several) as input. Almost no compilers out there compile directly from C to machine code, there is one or more intermediate forms in between. C is not a good input language for an optimizing compiler. It's a good and entirely valid comparison. It's the backend codegen that is being compared, the language frontend does not really play a part in it.