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by KerrAvon 1357 days ago
llvm-mos seems to optimize better than cc65, see discussion here:

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/335414-llvm-mos-simple-rog...

>The above code fills a graphics 8 screen. CC65 ran in 4587 jiffies while MOS did so in 2631. Another test leveraging lookups saw CC65 running in 2663 jiffies while MOS ran in 396 jiffies.

> I have C code that leverages page zero that brings CC65 down to 664 jiffies while MOS runs in 358.
2 comments
classichasclass 1357 days ago
Interesting post, thanks. It certainly seems like llvm-mos' codegen is improving markedly modulo some concerns brought up over bloat. But I also note that a number of the performance recommendations (prefer using more globals, avoid passing structures presumably due to the limited hardware stack) aren't exactly current programming convention - and for that matter, they're exactly what you would do writing assembly by hand. These recommendations would be true for cc65 too of course, but it still makes the point that using C to develop on 6502 is just making the dog walk, not the dog walking well.
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mysterymath 1357 days ago
The AtariAge results are fairly out-of-date; I think that's even before we started doing whole-program zero-page allocation.

The only real 6502-specific C caveat left for llvm-mos is that you should strongly prefer structs of arrays to arrays of structs; and that's not even that 6502-specific. Otherwise, standard C gives fairly tight assembly.

That being said, every couple hundred lines of generated assembly for any reasonably-sized C program will contain at least one WTF, from a human point of view. Removing those WTFs one at a time is the long tail of a compiler engineer. Still, I'm not going anywhere!

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homarp 1356 days ago
see also https://llvm-mos.org/wiki/Rationale

"As for the code itself, we perform a remarkably effective loop optimization that detects 16-bit index operations that can be converted to a 16-bit index plus an 8-bit offset. The latter is a directly-supported addressing mode on the 6502, and 8-bit index manipulation can be done in a single instruction.

This allows us to convert idiomatic 16-bit "int c" loops into something much more suitable for the 6502. Eventually, we hope that optimizations of this kind will transform standard, naive C code into tightly optimized 6502 code. "

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