Rugxulo wrote:
In short, not sure it's worth officially supporting any of this in a compiler. And yet this is the exact area where hand-written assembly is still direly needed. Personally I find it too complex (and boring), but it does speed up stuff sometimes.
Yes, but only in special cases (e.g., parallel processing) which are already hard to express in "classic" languages, i.e. the compiler would first have to "reverse-engineer" what the programmer writes (such as for-loops).
Only confusing for extreme portability. I think FPC and VPC default to 32-bit for it. (And yes, I know about _BP_UNPORTABLE_TYPES_ or whatever.) In other words, my Befunge "benchmark" counts down from -1 to MAXINT, and it takes much longer (!) when that is 64-bit. ;-)
Even worse, by the time your counter finishes, current processors may have 128 or 256 bit registers. Good luck with the next iteration. ;-)
Frank