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Comment on Superoptimizer – A Look at the Smallest Program (1987) [pdf]

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Same author did the synthesis kernel with Carl Pu, I think? The Synthesis kernel was genius, but relied on self modifying code, so can't work with modern chips well.

yes. Calton Pu. is that really such a problem? JITs seem to work pretty well, I'm pretty sure synthesis was more about creating custom paths than being strictly self-modifying, but it's been a long time.

update: oh, I just remembered why it _is_ an issue for modern processors, Massalin leaned very heavily on the general purpose double compare-and-swap that was present on some generations of the 68k architecture, and x86-64 only has double contiguous compare and swap

Yeah for the Quajects to get the JIT-ing to work, which was outrageous cool sounding when I first read about it. It is a same we can't figure out how to have nice things like that go fast(cache flushing).

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