Re:x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (2018)
by Banjo911 on Thursday October 07, 2021 @05:36PM
(#28792424)
The only thing you can't do is the sum of two data registers, and this only applies when calculating an effective address.
When you have 15 registers to work with that's not going to be more of a problem than only having 7 or 8 registers to work with.
Re:x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (2018)
by ajross on Thursday October 07, 2021 @05:46PM
(#28792527)
I don't want to be too blunt, but have you looked at early 90's era 68k compiler output? It was crap. When Sun launched SPARC, like half the advantage of the platform was that the compiler was suddenly generating this amazingly clean code. The phantom spills and intra-GPR movs everyone was used to disappeared overnight.
That's the kind of complexity that really hurts software. Compare vs. the commonly-cited x86 nonsense (the REP prefix, say), which complicates silicon implementations but generally makes software easier to write (c.f. decades of optimized inline memcpy implementations).
The point being the 68k was a dead end in a different direction. It was a "clean" archiecture from the perspective of a 1970's assembly programmer, but not a late 80's compiler writer.