Harald Armin Massa wrote: > >Faster than assembly? LOL... :) > > why not? Of course, a simple script like "copy 200 bytes from left to > right" can be handoptimized in assembler and run at optimum speed. > Maybe there is even a special processor command to do that. > > I learned that there was one generation of CPUs which had effectively a > command to copy X bytes from left to right; but a specific version of > that CPU did this command slower then a loop in certain situations. > Some newer generations of that CPU and even some competitors CPU had > that command implented correctly, and it was indeed faster than the > loop. > > Now: is it rather likely that for a single programm a programmer is > able to get it right for all CPUs? > > It even gets more complicated. The human mind is able to consider a > certain amount of things at once, sth. like on-chip-cache or > short-term-memory. > > Now with an ever growing complexity of processors, with cache lines, > partyparallelexecution, branchprediction, out of order execution, > multilevelcaching, hypermetathreading ... it may be that the usual > availaible human brain is no longer capable of really knowing what > happens.
global optimizers for non-C languages can sometimes produce faster code than human C coders, also when those optimizers use C as an intermediate language... </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list