Compiler Optimization Quotes

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Compilers resemble gluttonous eaters who devour excessive quantities of healthy food just to excrete them as refuse.

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds.

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.

No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.

It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one.