[Coco] CoCo 128-column text mode

[Steven Hirsch]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2015, Nick Marentes wrote:

> The same can be said of PC's and Mac's. They seem fast with their 
> gigahertz processor speeds and gigabytes of RAM but I bet if the OS was 
> written in 100% optimized M/L, the speed would be breathtaking. Of 
> course, it means developing code is a lot more difficult and more 
> difficult for others to understand.

It's harder than you might think to hand-optimize M/L code for CPUs that 
do speculative and out-of-order execution on multiple instruction 
pipelines.  At 10,000 ft. an Intel Core-whatever may look somewhat like 
its '486 predecessors, but down at the silicon we're not in Kansas 
anymore.

When you are writing an operating system, hand-crafted assembly code is 
required for some things.  At the application level?  Rarely, if ever.  A 
lot of effort goes into the optimization and code-generation stages in 
modern compilers.



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