From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-06-17T21:11:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Super-scalar Optimizations

Remembering, vaguely, my comp arch class, I'm pretty sure the co-worker 
(or cow-worker, if you really don't like him) was talking not about 
threading, but about how some VLIW (very long instruction word, i.e. not 
32-bit) machines include a 'predicate' in addition to the instruction 
(i.e. MOV FOO, BAR IF EQL ALREADY_RUN, 0 is one instruction). I presume, 
then, you guys are not running on x86.

And no, Ruby's too high level, and yeah, not compiled.

And wouldn't it be faster still just to pull foo = bar out of the while 
loop? :)

Devin

Robert Klemme wrote:

>Phil Tomson wrote:
>  
>
>>I'll take a stab at this, but I'm no expert....
>>
>>Your cow-worker _may_ be right about the differences between the two
>>code snippets.  I would think that you'd have to know what kind of
>>assembly code got generated by the two different snippets, though.
>>Perhaps he's taken a look at the compiled code.  It also seems like
>>it could differ a lot between compilers (g++ vs. VC++).
>>
>>As far as Ruby code goes, I don't think you would see any difference
>>because Ruby doesn't get compiled to native code (yet ;-).  Though
>>there may be differences in how the interpretter handles the two
>>different snippets which could possibly effect speed, it would have
>>nothing to do with anything deep down in the actual hardware
>>processor.
>>    
>>
>
>.... especially as Ruby does no parallelism internally (no native threads).
>
>My 0.02EUR...
>
>    robert
>  
>