Compiler Speed Trials

[boriel]

Boriel, I owe you an apology - there is an issue with your hisoft basic test. I absolutely should have made it clearer - and I would have if I thought you were going to replicate the tests!
If you recall, I noted that Hisoft ran far more slowly than I expected. The code listed above that you used does indeed take 4.8 seconds. But it's using floating point math to calculate k/2 on line 120.

As specified in the Hisoft Basic Manual, and as I noted, I had to tweak it to read:

Code:

120 LET V=INT(k/2)*3+4-5

in order to use Integer math, there. I should have made that MUCH clearer.
It's also a little misleading to say "using the same code" ZX Basic doesn't run that program in two seconds unless you use DIM to specify Integers. That's fair of course, since the REM does the same thing for Hisoft Basic. But it is worth noting the code does have to be very slightly different. An END IF if nothing else!

That's why I was asking which code you were using exactly!
The code I use for both tests was this:

Code:

6 DIM a,k,v,i as UInteger: DIM m(5) as UInteger: REM comment this line in HiSoft Basic
7 REM :INT +a,k,v,i,m()
8 REM : OPEN#
9 CLS
10 POKE 23672,0: POKE 23673,0
90 POKE 23672,0
100 LET a=0: LET k=5: LET v=0
110 LET a=a+1
120 LET v=k/2*3+4-5 : REM Int(K/2) rounds to ILong
130 GO SUB 1000
140 DIM m(5)
150 FOR i=1 TO 5 : REM change to 0 to 4 for ZX BASIC
160 LET m(i)=a
170 NEXT i
200 IF a<1000 THEN GO TO 110 : REM NEEDS AN END IF FOR ZX BASIC
210 PRINT (PEEK 23672+256*PEEK 23673)/50
999 STOP
1000 RETURN
1010 PRINT m(1),k,i,var : REM Never executed

And you'll find the Hisoft basic version does indeed return a 0.5 second time.

Then the compiler might be even doing a "Unused var removal" optimization. I need to get the generated ASM CODE, to see the Hisoft Routines, but It's my bet the program is being optimized that way or the m(i) access is optimized.

BTW I've optimized the array access a little (just 8 T-states per dimension).

I've created a benchmark directory in the compiler source and put this one, so benchmarks we create will be there.