[rescue] VAXstation questions

[Dave McGuire]

On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 07:21 AM, Peter Corlett wrote:
>> vlc$ ls -l helloworld
>> -rwxr-xr-x  1 mcguire  wheel  3816 May 13 18:57 helloworld
>> vlc$ size helloworld
>> text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
>> 1844    260     40      2144    860     helloworld
>> vlc$
>
> Object size tells you nothing, really.

   Object size...the size of the resulting executable...tells you 
nothing about the instruction set compactness of the target 
architecture?

   Umm, no.

   Other factors come into play as well...the object file format (elf, 
a.out, etc), the presence or absence of symbol tables, and (if present) 
the length of the symbol names in those symbol tables, as well as the 
compiler's code generation efficiency on the architecture in question.

   So...Your examples were Linux binaries...I'm not a Linux person and 
don't know anything about its executable format, but there is the whole 
apple/orange comparison there.

   But, within your two examples, while the M68K is a much more 
"compiler friendly" CISC architecture, I would fully expect GCC to 
produce better code (even though GCC generates fairly decent M68K code) 
on x86 than M68K because the GCC team has been wearing "x86 blinders" 
for the past several years now...targeting the bulk of their 
optimization efforts at that architecture while letting all the modern 
architectures rot.

   My statement was a generalization and a simplification, but it is 
still quite correct.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                "They live deeply, these vagabonds."
St. Petersburg, FL                            -Goro