Beating the compiler (2024)

Opening excerpt

In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool’s errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.

Written in ancient tomes , muttered in quiet watering holes , scrawled on the walls of bygone temples , hinted at by mysterious texts ; the rumors paint a specific picture:

Compilers are bad at generating code for interpreters, and it’s possible to outperform them by writing your interpreter in assembly.

I recently wrote a fast interpreter for the Uxn CPU , a stack-based architecture with 256 opcodes. The interpreter is a simple loop which reads a byte from RAM then selects the appropriate instruction:

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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