Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[Justin Johansson]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> Johansson wrote:
> > Got into OO with Smalltalk and with birth of C++ compilers, notably Zortech C++.
> 
> Then you've had experience with Walter's compilers before ;) He wrote Zortech.

Indeed, that's why the honourable mention in my bio :-)

Recall at the time it was the damm fastest blazing gun in the West - both compile and runtime wise!

Since being accustomed to consulting manufacturers' CPU & bit-slice architecture timing data sheets, microcode etc. to wring clock cycles out of low-level critical code, it was always interesting to examine the machine generated instructions produced by an optimizing C compiler do see if better could be done with hand-crafted assembler.

There was never much to gain using assembler on the PC with Walter's compiler though except in some very time critical routines like task context switching, semaphore locking, interrupt service routines and the like.

For embedded microprocessor work (CPUs not supported by Zortech), the (other) contemporary C compilers were generally pretty poor at optimizing machine instructions so assembly language was often a necessary tool of resort in those environments.