Oppolzer - Informatik / Blog

> there is a real thing to discuss behind all those stories, IMHO. Due to
> pipelining issues the proper order of instructions in the instruction stream
> becomes more important for modern hardware, and that is something that a human
> coder cannot do as good as a good optimizing compiler can. So I believe that
> ASSEMBLER programming will stay for some amount of time, because it is still
> important to manage those old application systems that are still around and
> working well, and it will continue to be important for some systems level work,
> but for application programming and new development, the future is elsewhere.

I'm sure that an optimizing compiler can do an amazing job, but in this case it
was Enterprise COBOL vs handcoded Assembler. I have a hard time believing that
COBOL is faster than assembler in any scenario. Enterprise COBOL is our 'main'
programming language and I haven't seen it perform any optimization worth
mentioning (even with OPTIMIZE(FULL)). The current compiler still generates
virtually the same code as it's predecessors did many versions ago.

Which means it is unforunate that Angel isn't able to post the code. Something
must be awfully wrong with the assembler code if it is twice as slow as the
Enterprise COBOL code...

F.

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