CONTENTS | INDEX | PREV | NEXT
In writing DICE my goals are as follows: Matt Dillion
- reasonably fast compilation. Modular executables for ease of use,
reliability, and testability.
- concentrate more on reliability and less on optimizations. Remember that
this is only the third major distribution of DICE, I expect some bugs
to show up. I expect to become more reliable than the two other
commercial C compilers in the Amiga market within a year.
- but do not forget optimizations... put in relatively easy to implement
optimizations that do not destroy the reliability of DICE. DICE does
no common sub-expression or loop unrolling optimizations, but does do
relatively smart register allocation and multi-level history to
propogate conditional expressions.
- provide comprehensive support of the Amiga, especially for new
versions of the OS that come out. DICE fully supports 1.3 and 2.0
with an easy extension mechanism to allow development on several
OS versions / betas simultaniously.
- I have always torn my hair out at not being able to easily fix bugs in
the support libraries for commercial compilers. DICE includes full
source for its support libraries (c.lib, m.lib, auto.lib) and a means
to remake the library. DICE also includes full source to some of
its own utilities, namely LIBTOS and the DCC frontend which are the
most likely candidates for programmer hair loss.