Hi Kiste, guys,

2011/5/9 Oliver Seitz <[email protected]>

My feeling is that an "end user" of a library expects fast and reliable
> execution and low overhead. He would not care if the lines that generated
> the hex file were human readable or not. As soon as the hex file is
> programmed to the PIC, what benefit would one have from a readable source
> code?
>

End users indeed may not care about readable JAL source in libraries, but
this reminds me two things:

  - As end users, many advocates they constantly jump into source code to
check something, make sure they have understood something correctly, etc...
It may depends on experience, but soon or later, you'll open lib source
code, and you'll then need readability.

  - as lib developpers, we need to be able to maintain libs, and asm isn't
known by all. In this context, readability means maintainability (if the
word exists...). So, if end user may not care at all (but I'm not so sure
according to my previous point), developpers do. If code becomes unreadable,
developpers won't be able to properly maintain and improve code, affecting
end users.

That said, there may be a treshold: using asm to deal with a huge data
structure, high level lib (eg. Minix) would be terribly painful, though
using asm for, you know, usual, small patterns, may help... In that case,
one could argue it should be part of compiler's output itself (like x / 2
<=> x >> 1)


Cheers,
Seb

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