Re: improve strlen

>I sugest that you have probably spent more time than it would take to write it
>in assembler and while the development may be useful to you in terms of
>portability, it is neither a development time or speed advantage.

Interesting hypothesis, what's it based on?


>In my youth I wrote ANSI C but time and cynicism lead me down the road
>of writing pure assembler in many places because portability in almost
>every instance is a myth. My main use for a C compiler these days is

It's a myth only to someone who never has to do it.


>don't properly understand that assembler can routinely work with the
>12000 plus API calls, the near massive collection of compatible C
>libraries, libraries written in assembler and so on.

That's their problem.


>Instruction choice is a matter of targetted market width. If the Linux
>desktop market is 2%, gaming is 0.01% of the sum total market and it
>makes high demands on video, meory and processor performance, all of
>which change on a weekly basis to a later faster and more expensive
>choice.

I don't find the prices rising, on the contrary a new hardware is
cheaper and faster than ever, and the prices of old hardware are diving
rapidly as we speak aswell.


>I have always been stuck with targetting code at the widest number of
>people and this means the furthest backwards compatibility for the
>current Window OS platform. This says primarily 486 code but there is

Out of curiosity, what software is that?


>The hallmark of modern application production is massive size
>increases, reduced functionality, inappropriately used threaded code
>with endless timing lags and very high demands on current hardware.

Yeah, damn Microsoft!


>This is fine and I hope it was useful to you but with the development
>time to produce a C++ version that is nearly as fast as an old
>assembler version, development time goes for the assembler code, not
>the C++ code.

You happen to know, how long it took Dr. Fog to develop the assembly
version? I happen to know pretty accurately how long it took to write
the C++ version.. I'm just guessing here, but I have a reason to
believe that you know neither.


>whatever else. Apart from speed issues, near complete freedom in terms
>of architecture has a lot going for it and in the case of MASM, its
>pre-processor will eat C compilers alive in terms of capacity.

MASM is fine if Windows is all you care about.


>Being able to design your own language free from the claptrap is one of
>the large advantages in assembler programming.

You meant programming using MASM?


>Very simple actually, the vast majority of computer around the world
>are not high end dual core AMD 64 Opterons with > 8 gig of memory but
>far more humble machines that profit from small fast software written
>in assembler where the later slow bloated hardware specific stuff just
>won't run on such boxes.

I would dare to say that your "0.01%" estimate is way unrealistic. I
don't recall the precise dates so I estimate (googling for precise
dates would make me look better but I don't care about that).

Let's say 386 been around since 1985 or thereabout, that's 20 years.
Let's say x86 compatible systems with SSE support as standard been
around since about 2000, that's 5 years.

I find it unbelievable, that in the first 15 years 99.99% of PC's in
*active use* today would be built, and only 0.01% of PC's in active use
today would been built after year 2000.

It just sounds totally unrealistic, the market has been expanding, not
shrinking overall during that time. This means that it's more likely
than in the last 5 years MORE systems been shipped than in the 6 years
before 2000.

I don't buy that 0.01% fud, it is totally unrealistic. Maybe I'm
missing the developing countries from my equation, that could explain
it, yeah.. </sarcasm>

.

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