Why C++ compiles slowly

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Fri Aug 20 14:28:52 PDT 2010


dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound2 at digitalmars.com)'s article
>> Adam Ruppe wrote:
>>> The Microsoft assembler used to have a whole bunch of weird macro
>>> capabilities and strange syntax. I hated it.
>> What I did when faced with such code is assemble it, *disassemble* the output,
>> and paste the output back in the source code and work from that.
> 
> How did you do this?

obj2asm foo.obj >foo.asm

> Don't you lose some important stuff like label names in the
> translation?  Instead of LSomeLabelName you get some raw, inscrutable hexadecimal
> number in your jump instructions.

Sure, it might need a bit of tidying up by hand, but that was a lot easier than 
trying to spelunk what those macros actually did.

I'm not the only one. I know a team at a large unnamed company that was faced 
with updating some legacy asm code that the original, long gone, programmers had 
gone to town with inventing their own high level macro language. Programmer 
after programmer gave up working on it, until one guy had no problem. He was 
asked how he worked with that mess, and he said no problem, he assembled it, 
obj2asm'd it, and that was the new source.


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