> I think he's saying that hand-coded assembly is more efficient than that generated by
> a C++ compiler. Which was true, kind of, once upon a time.
It's still true. You could write a C++ program, compile it and find some optimisations that the compiler didn't.
The only downside is you'll spend a very long time searching for a very small performance gain. Time that could be better spent working on other ways of speeding it up.
With a C++ program of MAME's complexity you'll still be going when faster processors can run the C++ version fast enough.
There are very (very) rare circumstances when you have an algorithm that can't be improved, hardware that can't be upgraded and an absolute requirement for performance. In these circumstances it can be worth dropping to assembler. Anyone who thinks they've come across one of these circumstances before was probably wrong and there was a cheaper way.
Edited by smf (04/17/12 08:41 AM)
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