> To be completely honest, I'm somewhat astonished that speed is one of the reasons to write the core in itself: Usually you would think it would be a reason to write it in a low level language.
Can anyone elaborate on this?
Can anyone elaborate on this?
I've done hand optimization of RISC assembly. It's fun, but nowhere near as productive as productive as coding in Python, or C for that matter.
That's what I liked about the 6502 - very simple, very direct and somewhat RISC-ish. Not many ways to do something. It is said the ARM was very 6502 influenced, but I never worked with it on a low level.
The other thing I liked about the 6502 was that I was flying under the OS all the time on those machines. Dealing with the OS at the machine-language-level is usually painful.
Also, unfortunately, current compilers are notoriously bad at generating code with special instructions (vectorized code).
So in the end applications that need to be really fast end up being written in assembly, or carefully written fortran and C code to generate a particular assembly.
Sounds like the downfall of the Itanium. They promised that the compilers would make it all usable, but the compilers never showed up.
Also, if you write the core in the language itself, when you improve your optimizations, you speed the core up too.
speed.pypy.org gives a timeout for me