From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Given Subject: Re: Compilers Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 12:58:00 +0100 Sender: linux-8086-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <40B87AC8.1010307@cowlark.com> References: <200405281142.38116.dg@cowlark.com> <20040528144700.GH21172@duckman.distro.conectiva> <40B87734.6050109@gmx.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <40B87734.6050109@gmx.de> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: linux-8086@vger.kernel.org Mark Junker wrote: [...] >> A -fno-frame-pointer option would be nice, too. I guess that most people >> wouldn't want them on ELKS, and it will make code smaller and use less >> stack space. > > This can (sometimes) produce smaller code. The main advantage is that you free up a register that can be used for other things. On the register-starved x86 family this is a huge benefit. I really don't know why people use a frame pointer anyway. Given that the i86 can do arbitrary relative stack addressing there's no real need for it. It makes debugging marginally easier, but then the debug information should provide all the necessary data to find the stack frame from any point in the code... (I work for a company that produces embedded operating systems, with our own cross-platform compiler architecture. The PowerPC has 32 general-purpose registers. Guess how many the 386 has? *Five*. That leads to interesting scalability issues in our register allocation code...) -- dg@cowlark.com --- http://www.cowlark.com My other account has a real signature.